COMMER - the Tadcaster-based leisure and property group which began ten years ago as a £500 investment by chairman and sole owner Jim Walsh - has sold its award-winning pub estate for £19 million.

The sale includes all of the Commer Group's 75 tenanted pubs from Leicestershire to Tyne and Wear, and the buyer is the Staffordshire-based Punch Pub Company, part of the Punch Group, the UK's largest operator with more than 5,000 outlets.

Mr Walsh said that while running pubs had been a core activity of his group "it became clear that the best way for us to accelerate growth in the group as a whole was to capitalise on our success in the last few years.

"We want to take the opportunity to increase our investment in areas that we have identified as more suitable for a privately-owned business such as ours."

Retaining his senior management team, Mr Walsh will now look for promising investment opportunities in the leisure industry, "either as equity investors or in joint venture partnership or by outright acquisition".

He planned to build on existing involvement in leisure industry technology and the Internet and further develop interests in the commercial property market.

The Commer Group already has a 50 per cent stake, along with games machine company Kunick Plc, in Nucleus Data, which supplies trading management data and analysis to major multiple leisure operators.

The group also owns pubklick.com, an Internet research and development vehicle for the leisure industry.

It owns its HQ, the imposing Commer House, in Tadcaster, some 12,000 sq ft of office space revamped from the 65-year-old former Tadcaster Rural District Council HQ.

Its pub division grew up from an initial buy-up of 34 pubs from Whitbread in 1996, then boosted by the purchase of 28 Tetley pubs three years later.

The pub division was awarded an industry "Oscar" in March when it was voted Independent Pub Chain of the Year.