They're about to pocket £90m after building an empire of 900 homes... so why are Baron and Baroness Buy-to-Let in such a grump?

Fergus and Judith Wilson's properties spread through M20 corridor in Kent

Mrs Wilson calls them her 'babies' and says she'll miss them

Ex-teachers rode property wave of early Noughties

Now dogged by complaining tenants and court cases 

Wending through the sapling-lined streets of a soulless suburban housing estate, Judith Wilson gestures towards a row of identical, yellow-brick semis, each with a neatly-trimmed hedge and postage-stamp lawn. 

‘Number 23 is ours, over there,’ she tells me, ‘and numbers 25 and 27. Then we have all the ones on that side of the road — numbers 38, 42, 46 and 48 . . .’

‘Yes, we own 22 homes on this particular estate,’ her bulky husband, Fergus, interjects from the passenger seat of their secondhand Land Rover . 

‘We bought them off-plan in 2003, and by the time we took possession we’d already made £27,000 on each one, which is a profit of £594,000, I think you’ll find. Not a bad bit of business, was it?’

Ex-teachers Fergus and Judith Wilson made a buy-to-let fortune from the once-dilapidated towns near the Channel Tunnel rail terminal at Ashford, Kent, in the early Noughties

On a pleasant summer’s afternoon, Mr and Mrs Wilson — the undisputed Baron and Baroness of Buy-to-Let — have whisked me on an impromptu inspection tour of their sprawling fiefdom: more than 900 rental properties spread through the so-called M20 corridor, in Kent.

They are mightily proud of this self-grown empire in the Garden of England, checking their Eastern European handymen have done the repairs, and even spying through the window of one recently vacated house to ensure its interior décor is still magnolia and white, as their strict lease rules stipulate.

A misty-eyed Mrs Wilson tells me she knows each house and regards them as her ‘babies’. ‘I’ll miss them terribly when they go,’ she says.

 

More...

• SIMON LAMBERT: Wilsons offloading their empire tells buy-to-let, lend-to-save and bond investors something about buying low and selling high
• House prices dip in June as fewer buyers look for homes - but values are still nearly £16k higher than same point last year
• We're selling up... and we'll make £250m! Buy-to-let property moguls put entire 1,000-home portfolio on the market

But go they must, it seems. For this week, the Wilsons — former teachers who rode the great property wave of the early Noughties to make a buy-to-let fortune from the once-dilapidated towns near the Channel Tunnel rail terminal at Ashford — announced that they plan to sell their entire portfolio.

Now in their mid-60s, dogged by complaining tenants and court cases (Mr Wilson, a 22-stone former boxer, was convicted of assaulting one of his former letting agents), and criticised for evicting 200 tenants on housing benefits to make way for ‘hard-working’ Poles, they plan to retire.

They are asking for the combined market value of their houses, which they reckon to be between £230 and £250 million. After repaying 62 per cent of that sum in mortgages, they would clear about £90 million. Less capital gains tax, of course.

Now in their mid-60s, dogged by complaining tenants and court cases (Mr Wilson, a 22-stone former boxer, was convicted of assaulting one of his former letting agents), and criticised for evicting 200 tenants on housing benefits to make way for ‘hard-working’ Poles, they plan to retire

For a couple who were so poor when they met as students that Mr Wilson slept on a bench in Greenwich Park to save his grant money, it’s a fabulous sum. But don’t imagine they are laughing all the way to the bank.

The Wilsons are plainly not interested in the trappings of wealth — ‘I might manage a day-trip to Calais but I’ll be bored after a day,’ harrumphs Fergus, when asked whether they’ll use the money to see the world —– and one suspects their remarkable success story isn’t ending quite as they’d envisaged.

When I last interviewed them, seven years ago, it was all so different. The credit crunch was then an unforeseen nightmare, and they were amassing houses at a bewildering rate. Indeed, Mr Wilson left the room to make a brief phone call to buy three more — taking their tally to 707.

Buoyant then, their aim was to keep on buying and hand the business on to their elder daughter, Samantha, then in her mid-30s and also a teacher.But they tired of calls about faulty gas meters and plumbing problems.

This week, they insisted they had no regrets and were simply cashing in on the latest property bubble. Yet when we shook hands at their favourite meeting place — a sales reps’ hotel off the M20 — they seemed deflated.

Once the toast of suburbia for their classroom-to-riches wheeze, they were clearly baffled and embittered by a recent string of negative articles and wounding internet posts, and despite his chipper manner and dandyish jacket, Mr Wilson, who suffers from diabetes, is not in the best of health.

His wife looked jaded, too. She was more animated when discussing her grandchildren, and the blackcurrant jam she had just made, than interest rates. As for their hopes for a buy-to-let dynasty, neither Samantha nor Tanya, their second daughter, want the ‘hassle’, they said.

The Wilsons’ critics will doubtless enjoy the irony of this; they might even view it as some sort of moral comeuppance. After all, by borrowing vast sums and vacuuming up swathes of cheap property for profit, didn’t they and their ilk price ordinary folk out of the market?

During the years when houses started to be used as a commodity rather than places to live in, and banks lent with reckless abandon, didn’t they epitomise all that was wrong with the economy — and help to bring it crashing down?

The Wilsons are asking for the combined market value of their houses, which they reckon to be between £230 and £250 million. After repaying 62 per cent of that sum in mortgages, they would clear about £90 million. Less capital gains tax, of course

Fairer, perhaps, to say that they were creatures of their times; and at least they were local, hands-on landlords — unlike their successors, absentee speculators in the Far East.

Whatever the truth, Mr Wilson splutters on his digestive biscuits at the very mention of such debate, suggesting it’s all the work of the ‘Left-wing press’.

He cites the Guardian, which ran a story about one of its IT staff who claims he was summarily evicted by the Wilsons for daring to complain about a broken boiler. (Mr Wilson says he wanted him out to raise the rent.)

Peering over her rimless spectacles, Mrs Wilson offers a more measured response: ‘We have never, ever taken a house in precedent to a first-time buyer; and we actually provide homes for people who wouldn’t be able to afford anywhere else.’

Defensively, the couple reel off a list of good deeds they have done for their tenants. They have helped a disabled man with his chores, they say; provided free translators for immigrants; found shelter for battered wives. It’s all part of the service.

Maybe so, but Mr Wilson doesn’t do a very good PR job. He frequently rants about his tenants, his bugbear being single mums, whom he evidently regards as universally ditsy.

When he makes after-dinner speeches, their inability to perform even the most basic task, such as turning the immersion on, is the butt of his jokes, which cast political correctness to the four winds.

He also spouts on rather cruelly about the tenants he has evicted — and not just the 200 benefits claimants who received possession notices this year because (understandably, you might think) he tired of them spending the rent allowance they receive directly from the council.

Then there are the more bizarre complaints they’ve had to deal with.

‘We had one lady who kept phoning up and saying, “The blackbirds keep eating the cherries off the trees”,’ he blusters in his gruff, East End accent. ‘In the end, it got such a problem that I ended the tenancy.

‘Sorry about that, but this is a business! I’ve always said that if you want a landlord you can deal with personally, then we aren’t the ones for you. We may have been 20 years ago, but not now.

‘If someone comes and says, “My husband’s run off and left me”, what should I do? Well, I’m sorry, I’m not a marriage councillor — I don’t want to be involved. As landlords, we don’t have a duty of care. That’s for the council.’

 I work 37 hours a day, ten days a week now, so I’ll probably be bored to tears

Fergus Wilson 

Outbursts such as this are hardly likely to smooth Mr Wilson into the post-retirement role he covets — as the Government’s ‘housing czar’ (a post he would only accept for a fat salary, he adds). His wife says her husband has been shooting from the lip for the 40-odd years she has known him.

Popular myth has it that they started their business by saving the deposit for their first house, costing £8,200, when both were teachers. But there are less romantic caveats to this tale.

Mr Wilson admits he also scraped money together by taking part in rigged prize-fights in the boxing booths of Barking. He also imported racing pigeons from Antwerp and sold them at auction, earning up to £1,000 commission in a single day — one-third of his annual teaching salary.

They began buying houses at just the right time, during the negative equity crisis of the early 1990s, when cheap repossessions were their stock-in-trade. 

They also showed an unerring instinct to identify up-and-coming property hot-spots. In many ways, they were the perfect team for this lucrative game: council estate-raised Mr Wilson with his East End market-trader mentality and overbearing presence, his wife a natural penny-watcher and a stickler for detail, with the patience to study demographic patterns and social trends.

Shortly before the crunch, they had achieved such acclaim that Mr Wilson was to star in a reality TV show about property investment, while Mrs Wilson was appointed an ‘adjunct’ professor (an honorary position) specialising in entrepreneurship at Imperial College London — a role from which she recently stepped down.

They were ready to sell their empire then, they say, and received several promising offers, including one from a consortium of professional footballers.

Then the crunch came and the bids were abruptly withdrawn. Autumn 2008 was their lowest ebb. Mr Wilson denies they were £350,000 in arrears and close to going under, as was reported, saying that overstretched building society staff failed to log a monthly payment in the computer.

When the Channel Tunnel was closed for four months for repairs after a fire, leaving many tenants whose jobs relied on the tunnel out of work and unable to pay the rent, he admits it was a worrying time.

Twenty per cent of their tenants were in arrears, so their income barely covered their mortgages, and relief came only when the Bank of England dropped interest rates to 0.5 per cent.

Since then, the profits have been rolling in again, but the Wilsons’ troubles persist.

Denied permission to build a large retirement home in Boughton Monchelsea, the Kent village where they have built an eight-bedroom mansion, they sold parcels of the intended site to travellers — infuriating neighbours, who claimed they had acted out of spite.

Once, they were much-liked and admired pillars of their community; now they wouldn’t win a local popularity contest.

Then they became embroiled in a wrangle with an agency which managed 280 of their houses. Mr Wilson is now suing them for alleged ‘professional negligence’.

Among this agency’s employees is David Wells, 31, who claims Mr Wilson was so furious at being pestered about yet another faulty boiler that the landlord burst into his office and thumped him, knocking him out of his swivel chair.

Folkestone magistrates convicted Mr Wilson of assault, three months ago, and ordered him to pay £1,650 in fines and costs.

However, though he boasts of being a handy light-heavyweight in his day, and admits he never liked Mr Wells, Mr Wilson denies landing a blow and claims the agent merely toppled from his swivel chair in fright.

Bizarrely, he says he will request permission to take a punch-ball into Canterbury crown court when his appeal is heard on August 5 ‘to show them how hard I can hit’ — presumably to suggest that if he had punched Mr Wells, the damage would have been considerable.

One wonders whether this tawdry episode is indicative of the strain that he has been under; though he shrugs off the suggestion, saying: ‘I’m not a chap who gets worried about stress.’

In any event, he will soon have much more time on his shovel-sized hands. So how will he use it?

‘I work 37 hours a day, ten days a week now, so I’ll probably be bored to tears,’ he grizzles.

But at least he has found a new venture, which sounds a bit like a buy-to-let version of publishing. He comes up with the plots for internet-only novels — and hires budding authors to write them.

He chides Judith by suggesting that she has pretensions to live ‘like a retired country lady’, but she puts it differently. She simply wishes to spend more time with her two young grandchildren, tend her menagerie of pets — six horses, five ‘very big’ dogs, eight cats, 12 rabbits and ‘hundreds’ of chickens.

She won’t need £90 million to do that. How will they spend it?

‘I won’t believe we’ve got it until it’s in the bank, so let’s just wait,’ Mrs Wilson retorts, with characteristic caution.

Mr Wilson signals his agreement with a growl. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pat the horses on the nose every day, and I’ll pat the cats —even though I don’t know their names and they all look the same.

‘That’s the simple life we enjoy, and you can’t put a price on it.’

With that, Baron and Baroness Buy-To-Let drive back to their rural pile. In time, perhaps, they will adjust to life as retired tycoons and come to enjoy their millions.

Yet one suspects they will always hanker for the housing estates and the thrill of the deal.