The Taylor Wimpey share price has ticked up 1% in morning trading today, adding to yesterday’s 0.5% gain, after the housebuilder, one of the UK’s biggest, announced the appointment of Jennie Daly as chief executive. Ms Daly will become the first female boss of one of the UK’s major listed housebuilders and is to replace Pete Redfern who announced in December he is to leave the business after 14 years in charge.

Daly is an internal appointment after a recruitment process that looked at candidates from inside and outside the company and has sat on the Taylor Wimpey board as group operations director for the past 4 years. She joined the company as UK planning director in 2014, moving over from rival Redrow and is due to assume her new role at the end of April following the company’s annual general meeting.

Commenting on the appointment, Taylor Wimpey’s chairwoman Irene Dorner commented:

“Jennie has extensive experience in the housebuilding sector and has demonstrated exceptional leadership and a razor sharp operational focus. Her strong focus on execution, combined with her customer and people-focused skills, set her apart from the other candidates we were considering.”

Daly herself called her appointment as chief executive of the group, which has a stock market capitalisation of £5.5 billion, as “an honour and a privilege”, continuing:

 “This is an outstanding business with a strong land bank and strategic land pipeline and a talented and committed team.”

When Daly steps into her new role Taylor Wimpey will become just the third FTSE 100 company to have a female chair and chief executive with the water utility Severn Trent and insurer Admiral the other two. It’s a particularly progressive appointment for a major housebuilder, which is traditionally male dominated. None of the other ‘big’ listed housebuilding companies, considered to include Persimmon, Bellway, Berkeley, Barrat and Vistry, have ever had a female chief executive.

Across the broader property sector there are only two other female chief executives of London-listed firms, the rental group Grainger whose boss is Helen Gordon, and Rita-Rose Gagné at Hammerson, a REIT focused on shopping centre properties.

Daly’s agreed compensation package is for a base salary of £750,000 plus pension contributions worth £75,000 a year. She can also earn an annual bonus worth up to £1.1 million and share options worth up to £1.5 million. Mr Redfern earned £892,000 in his final year in the job and Ms Daly’s slightly smaller package reflects that this will be her first chief executive job.

Well regarded in the industry, Ms Daly’s former boss at Redrow Steve Morgan commented supportively on the news that he was

“big fan of Jennie . . . I think she is excellent and there is no one more dedicated to the job on the planet.”

However, it is still unclear if the appointment will meet the approval of the activist investor Elliott Advisors, which late last year broke cover as a top five shareholder and has made it clear its preference was for an external candidate.

The investor yesterday issued a cautious statement through a spokeswoman who said Elliott was “pleased to see progress on management and board change”, before adding the new chief executive would need to quickly meet the challenge of correcting “the deep share-price underperformance that has persisted in recent years” if she is to retain that conditional support.

The company’s share price is still down 30% on its pre-pandemic levels and the sector faces the headwinds of rising interest rates, the end of the government-supported Help to Buy scheme and potential liabilities to fix the dangerous cladding installed on legacy buildings. The government wants developers to foot the majority of the bill for replacing cladding following the Grenfell Tower enquiry.