101 Nick Leslau
£188m
Prestbury/Max Property
Prestbury put three London properties on the market this year: 6-10 Andrew Street, EC4, sold to Orchard Street Investment Management for £23.5m, and 55 Newman Street, W1, to Freud Communications for £21m. In July, Prestbury put 101 St Martin’s Lane, WC2, on the market, seeking offers in excess of £37m, reflecting a 5.75% net initial yield. The 48,628 sq ft office building generates £2.3m pa of rental income.
Leslau’s stake in the quoted Max Property Group is now worth more than £21m. The London-based company floated on the stock market in 2009 and is now worth £232m.
Leslau trained as a chartered surveyor, and later teamed up with Nigel Wray. Today they co-own a property group called Prestbury Investment Holdings, with £61.8m net assets in 2011. The pair sold off properties well before the credit crunch, redeploying the proceeds in budget hotels, private healthcare and theme parks.
The profits from these deals, his Max stake, hefty dividends of more than £40m since 2000 and his personal property assets take Leslau to £188m.
102 Nick Capstick-Dale
£185m
UK Real Estate
In April this year, Capstick-Dale’s UK Real Estate sold the 36,000 sq ft Oxgate Works in Hendon, north London, to the UK’s largest Chinese food supplier, W Wing Yip, for £3m.
Work has started on rebuilding the famous Lighthouse building that stands outside London’s King’s Cross station. It was bought for around £4m in 2006 by Capstick-Dale, a shrewd property man. He also owns a stunning building in London’s Docklands, which he bought at the depth of the recession.
Capstick-Dale learned about property working as an estate agent in London and in 1986 started trading in property. In 1989, three months before the property crash, he sold all his properties.
A year later, he was buying back some of his assets at a 40% discount. Since then, through his main company, UK Real Estate, based in London, he has been assembling an impressive long-term portfolio held mainly through his UK Real Estate operation, which is now worth around £185m.
103= The Duke of Buccleuch & family
£180m
Buccleuch Estates
Buccleuch Estates, the property arm of the Buccleuch family, reduced its losses in 2011 from £4.2m to £1.5m on £30.4m sales, with net assets up to £113m. It is building a rural property management operation and concentrating on commercial property activities, renewable energy, tourism and sustainable food.
Buccleuch became the 10th duke when he inherited the title from his father in 2007. The immensely popular 9th Duke, Europe’s largest landowner, left £320m in his will. Art treasures and antique furniture were valued in the will at £224m.
But we cut that back to £134m, taking account of any likely tax bill, should the current duke want to sell. While the family’s huge land holdings were never very valuable, diversification into property is paying dividends. In all, we still value the duke at £180m.
103= Terence Cole
£180m
Marcol
London-based Marcol has interests in many sectors, including care homes, hospitals, hotels, industrial, leisure, offices, residential and retail, with a combined portfolio value of around £2.5bn.
The business was started in 1976 by property entrepreneurs Terence Cole and his business partner Mark Steinberg. The pair have made a hugely successful foray into Europe.
Its Retail Property Investment Trust was formed to assemble a retail portfolio throughout Germany. It now has more than 150 properties occupied by some of Germany’s leading retailers.
In 2009, Marcol and a private equity partner concluded the largest private equity deal in Germany with its acquisition of Median Kliniken, the country’s leading rehabilitation care provider.
Cole has around 411 directorships. The largest company we can see is New Derwent House Management, which made £4m profit and showed £190m net assets in 2010-11. Cole has a 40% stake in its parent. But his other assets take him to a conservative £180m.
103= Mark Steinberg
£180m
Marcol
Britannia Parks, Marcol’s joint venture with Frogmore, sold 17 sites to Turners Parks at the beginning of December 2011, netting them £33.1m. Britannia Parks had become the second-largest residential park home operator in the UK, though it now still retains two sites in Cornwall and Essex comprising a total of 825 units.
Steinberg runs London property company Marcol with partner Terence Cole. Set up in 1976, it comprises at least 40 companies developing and owning property across Europe.
The largest company we can see is New Derwent House Management which made £4m profit and showed £190m net assets in 2010-11. Steinberg has a 40% stake in its parent. But his other assets take him to a conservative £180m.
106= John Berkley & family
£170m
Berkeley Leisure
John Berkley chairs The Berkley Leisure Group, a largely family-owned mobile home operator and property developer, based in Yeovil, with 45 parks throughout the UK.
In 2011, it made £5.5m profit on £17m sales. It has £75m net assets, but the annual report states that they are worth around £100m more than the book value. The shares are largely owned by Berkley and his family.
They take little out of the business and, including other assets, we value the family at £170m.
106= David Coffer
£170m
St James Capital
David Coffer has been advising on the leisure sector for more than 40 years, having started Davis Coffer Lyons in 1972. The ace dealmaker has also been heavily involved in some shrewd deals on his own account.
With Anthony Lyons, Coffer sold the first 50% of the Earls Court and Olympia exhibition centres in a £280m deal in 2007. The remaining 50% stake was sold in 2010.
We can see eight companies with £36m net assets in total where he has stakes worth around £8m. Coffer’s personal assets were valued at £80m at the market peak. With the recent sale, he should be worth £170m.
106= Eliasz Englander & family
£170m
Citywise
Englander is a shy property developer, largely unknown beyond the London orthodox Jewish community. He once “sold” his Holborn site for a day in order for a crane to be erected on a Saturday, the day on which orthodox Jews are forbidden to work.
Englander has developed its trophy asset, Holborn Links in central London, after buying it for £118m in 2000. He also put a slice of Kensington on the market in 2010 with a £110m price tag.
The Holborn Links company made a £2.4m profit and showed more than £136m net assets (up £5m) in 2010. The family also has several other separate smaller companies with net assets totalling at least £100m. Allowing for overlapping stakes, and so on, the Englander family is easily worth £170m.
106= Gary Widdowson
£170m
Kenninghall Holdings
It should be no surprise that Gary Widdowson, an international showjumper in his youth, used Kenninghall Holdings to sponsor international showjumper Nick Skelton, particularly in his quest to be part of the London 2012 Olympic squad.
Widdowson now runs Kenninghall Holdings, a north London-based property group with £20.1m net assets in 2011. He also sold his London-based metal recycling operation in 2006 for around £120m, retaining a 22% stake.
Now called Metal & Waste Recycling, it was started by his father and made £8m profit on £258.5m sales in 2010.
Widdowson bought a 2,000-acre Norfolk estate for £25m in 2008. With other assets, he is worth £170m.
110 Steve & Clive Brooks
£166m
BoultBee Brooks
Mayfair property is attracting Boultbee Brooks now. The brothers started in property in 1987. They had a long and successful foray into Europe selling three Swedish shopping centres in 2010 for £125m.
Their Hereford-based Boultbee Construction made a £152m profit on £158m sales in 2010-11. With £94.5m net it is worth £160m. We add £6m for other assets.
111= John Lynch & family
£165m
John Lynch (Builders)
In October 2011, Lynch sold a 118-acre chunk of land in South Ayrshire for £9.1m. LXB Retail Properties snapped up the site, located on the A77 at Corton, and intends to file a planning application to allow it to develop shops and housing on the site.
John Lynch chairs the family-owned John Lynch (Builders), an Ayr-based property-to-construction group that has been built up over the past 43 years. It had £9m net assets in December 2010. But under Lynch’s shrewd management, significant land holdings of around 280 acres of development land in Scotland have been built up over the years and are worth around £110m.
Other assets such as farms, investments and properties take the Lynch family to around £165m in the current climate.
111= Clinton, Spencer & John McCarthy
£165m
Churchill Retirement Living
Specialist house builder Churchill Retirement Living is run by Spencer and Clinton McCarthy. In the year to May 2011, it made a £5.2m profit on £44m sales. Its net assets now stand at nearly £90m. Some investments have been sold for £20m cutting the group’s borrowings to just £10m.
The McCarthy brothers learned all about the retirement home market from their father, John, who set up McCarthy & Stone, which was floated on the stock market in 1982.
He developed the business but left in 2004 after backing the first rebuffed bid for the operation by his sons. McCarthy stood down as chairman and sold his stake for £74.4m.
His sons run Lymington-based Churchill, and the family is now worth £165m.
111= Michael & Robert Slowe & family
£165m
J Leon & Co
Cousins Michael and Robert Slowe are directors of J Leon, a family-owned property investment and holding company. Based in London, the company and family are very low key.
Three-quarters of the group’s portfolio consists of high street shops, though it also invests in retail warehouses and residential properties. Projects include ZeroC’s Olympic sailing village at Portland and a 250-unit residential scheme in Chichester.
In 2011-12, it made a £4.7m loss on
£8.6m sales and showed net assets of nearly £165m.
With low borrowings and a strong balance sheet, the company is easily worth slightly below its net asset figure. The wider Slowe family takes little out of the business, and should be worth £165m.
114 Brian Scowcroft & Janet Lefton
£162m
Alard Properties/BI Properties
Scowcroft’s Kingmoor Park Properties operation saw its net assets rise in 2010-11 to £21.4m. He has ploughed around £7m of his own money into the site outside Carlisle, helping create more than 1,300 jobs.
Before his property work, Scowcroft was boss of Swinton Insurance, started by his father in 1957. By the early 1990s the Scowcroft family had made around £150m from the sale of the business.
Lefton, his sister, runs BI Properties and Scowcroft has interests in a bottled water operation in Morecambe Bay. Scowcroft is a sponsor of Carlisle’s fast-improving Richard Rose Academy.
We can see £29m net assets in the family companies. In all, the family is worth £162m after tax.
115= Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe & family
£160m
Calthorpe Estates
Calthorpe Holdings made a £1.2m profit
in 2011-12, but its net assets jumped to £6.5m.
The company has been involved in an ambitious £350m development programme on the Calthorpe estate covering 1,550 acres of Edgbaston. The estate dates back to 1717.
Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe inherited his title from his late grandfather in 1985. The estate is worth £80m. His trusts made around £40m profit in 1999 by selling off 300 acres in Hampshire, leaving the family with 4,000 acres there.
Hampshire-based Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe also has interests in the US, the Gulf and Europe. He is still easily worth £160m.
115= Tony Bramall & family
£160m
Bramall Properties
Bramall’s Bramall Properties operation is active in Yorkshire. It bought nearly £14m of Leeds properties from quoted Town Centre Securities in 2009. But Bramall is best known for his role in the car trade.
In 1963, he joined his father’s Sheffield-based car dealer, which was taken over for £45m in 1987. Three years later, Bramall put £1.5m into his second car venture, CD Bramall. That was sold in 2004 and Bramall made £76m for his stake.
His third foray came when, in 2006, he paid £56m to acquire a stake in Lookers, Britain’s second biggest quoted car dealership. That stake is now worth £62m. Bramall also had another car dealership, Bramall & Jones, which was sold in 2010, netting him a further £18m.
We can also see another £38m of net assets in the 2010-11 accounts of Bramall Properties and the Winterquay farming ventures.
In all, the Bramall family is easily worth £160m after tax and reinvestment of sale proceeds.
115= John Robinson
£160m
Jupiter
John Robinson, a chartered accountant by training, joined Arthur Andersen and later worked under financier John Duffield at Jupiter Asset Management. He left in 2000 with a £50m pay-off when the business was taken over.
His investments and a stable of high-end properties worldwide easily give him a £160m fortune.
He is heavily involved in the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth.
115= Rashid & Aziz Tayub & family
£160m
Crown Crest (Holdings)
Crown Crest supplies branded groceries to value retailers from depots in Leicester and Nottingham. It also owns 371 Poundstretcher outlets. In addition, it purchased 15 former Woolworths stores, allegedly saving some 235 jobs. Its sales increased to £409m in 2011.
The Leicester-based Crown Crest property and distribution operation was started in 1977 in a small corner shop by the Tayub family after it left Malawi. Three separate Tayub companies, led by Crown Crest Group, made a total of £21m profit on £528m sales in 2010-11. They are worth £130m.
Collectively we value the family, led by Rashid and Aziz, at £160m with other assets including Poundstretcher, which was bought in 2007 through Seaham Investments, a property subsidiary of Crown Crest.
119 Michael Shanly
£157m
Shanly Group
Michael Shanly, is a property developer worth £157m. In July he was fined £400,000 plus costs for failing to pay inheritance tax on money left by his mother in a secret Geneva account. He failed to disclose the account even after HMRC opened a civil investigation into his financial affairs and his companies in 2005 on suspicion of serious tax fraud, after which he agreed to pay HMRC £1.5m.
The Thames Valley and Buckinghamshire are fertile territory for Shanly, who founded the upmarket Michael Shanly housebuilding operation in 1970. He chairs and owns at least 12 significant but separate building or development companies. Michael Shanly Homes is very active in Battersea, south-west London, where it is converting the former labour exchange into luxury housing.
But his main operation is Sorbon Homes, which made a £7.3m profit on £50.3m sales in 2010. It has £61.4m net assets. Other Shanly companies, including Sorbon Investments, take the total Shanly net assets to £145m with profits of £17.3m.
We value the businesses on the net asset figure, adding £12m for Shanly’s past salaries and other assets.
120 Anthony Brotherton-Ratcliffe & family
£156m
Maybrook Properties
In 2011, Croudace Homes sold the 160,000 sq ft Maybrook industrial estate in Brownhills, West Midlands, for £6.1m to Highcross, representing a healthy 10.6% yield.
Croudace recovered further in 2011 to make a £7m profit on £97m sales. The Caterham-based company has more than £85m net assets.
Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who served in the RAF during the second world war, arrived as a partner after the war and bought out the business in 1950. He died in 2009. The business is now run by his son, Anthony.
The family also owns Croudace Properties Group and Maybrook Properties, which showed more than £69m net assets between them in 2011. We value the three businesses at £146m. Other assets take the family to £156m after tax.
121= Rodger Dudding
£155m
Lonsto International
Rodger Dudding is Britain’s king of lugs – or lock-up garages. He has around 12,000 of them and is still buying them at the rate of one site a week. In total, they have recently been valued at £120m.
The lugs came about by accident in 1975 when a friend suggested Dudding should buy a block of lock-ups in south London. He realised the garage business was fragmented and not regarded as a serious business. Single-handedly he changed all that. Today, he is also busy with small-scale developments of garage sites, turning them into badly needed housing.
Dudding’s latest venture is classic car storage. With 70 of his own classic cars, he has set up a secure facility in the home counties and will welcome other enthusiasts.
The son of a naval officer, Dudding took a craft apprenticeship in naval engineering over the five years from 1954 to 1959 at Chatham’s naval dockyard. He regards it as invaluable experience, “keeping one on the straight and narrow and instilling discipline”, he contends.
After his naval career was cut short by injury, Dudding went into business before launching Lonsto (International) which makes and installs ticket and queue management systems used by banks and supermarkets. That business is still thriving and at least 6m people a day pass through a Lonsto queuing system.
Several of his sites have been sold with planning permission and others have been developed and retained by Dudding.
Around 100 of his 800 sites are being looked at by the planners for development purposes. Dudding’s other assets and businesses add £35m. But even if a 10th of the sites get planning permission, Dudding will go much higher.
121= Nicholas & Peter Gould
£155m
Regis
London-based Regis has seen the value of its property portfolio increase sharply. Its parent company Regis Group (Holdings) showed nearly £79m net assets in 2010-11.
The business is owned by the Gould brothers, Nicholas and Peter, and has been investing in the residential property sector for more than 50 years.
Regis also has a strong residential property portfolio in the US. The Goulds should now be worth £155m.
121= John Guthrie & family
£155m
Broadland Properties
Guthrie chairs Broadland Properties, the Scarborough property operation, which made £6.1m profit on £30.9m sales in 2011. It is easily worth its almost £142m net assets.
But look back to 2005 for more clues of Guthrie’s wealth when Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing bought the quoted Merchant Retail for £220m. Guthrie owned 10% of the company, which he had bought into at 9p a share against the disposal price of 197p.
Other assets and further share sales such as White Rose Finance (£5m net assets) should take the Guthrie family to perhaps £155m after tax.
121= Sir Peter Michael
£155m
Stockford
Sir Peter Michael’s Highcross has had a busy year, letting and selling properties, and generally making money. In July, it let 14,000 sq ft of office space at its WIRA business park in Leeds to Gamestec Leisure on a 10-year lease.
It is understood to be paying close to £14 per sq ft. Highcross has also let 456,000 sq ft of industrial space to B&M Retail on Merseyside on a three-year lease, 213,000 sq ft to Davis Haulage on a 10-year lease, and a 405,000 sq ft unit in Cheshire to Jaguar Land Rover for 10 years, among other deals.
An electronics engineer, Michael sold his Quantel special effects operation in 1988, netting £60m. He later made more than £20m from building Classic FM and established the highly regarded Peter Michael Winery in California.
Best known now for his Vineyard at Stockcross hotel in Berkshire, Michael has launched the Highcross £1.7bn fund to invest in the depressed property market. His main company, Stockford, showed £37.3m net assets in 2011.
In all, Michael’s interests and share sales should be worth £155m.
125 Charles Clowes
£152m
Clowes Developments
East Midlands entrepreneur Charles Clowes and a partner bought the Solstice Park distribution centre on the A303 in Wiltshire late in 2011 from the receiver. A rebranding exercise has resulted in the name change for the 64-acre site to Imperium.
Clowes founded his CWC Group in 1964. In 2010-11, it made £2.6m profit on £12.2m sales. It has £62.2m net assets, but press reports suggest that Clowes had been looking to sell up for £300m. But in the current climate, we settle for a £150m valuation. We add £2m for smaller Clowes companies.
126= Paul Caddick & family
£150m
Caddick Group
Paul Caddick founded Yorkshire-based Caddick Group in 1979 and it has evolved into a high-quality property-to-construction group. It has a roster of blue-chip clients and was involved in the new Trinity Quarter shopping centre in Leeds, but in 2007 sold its share to its partner, the giant Land Securities property group.
Caddick is also expanding fast in retirement homes through its Oakbridge Retirement Villages joint venture. The group also shares ownership of the Headingley Carnegie Stadium, home of Leeds Rhinos and Leeds Carnegie (formerly Leeds Tykes) rugby teams and Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Caddick chairs the parent company for the rugby operations, Leeds Rugby, where Caddick Group has a 76% stake.
In the year to August 2011, Caddick Group made a £2.7m loss on £62.3m sales, while net assets came in at £38m. The Caddick family and trusts own more than 90% of the shares. Other private assets and sale proceeds take the Caddick family to £150m.
126= The Dunsdon family
£150m
Coldunell
Esher-based property company Coldunell made £5.2m profit on £10.6m sales in 2010-11. Its net assets hit £117.4m. The business was run by John Dunsdon until his sudden death in June.
Dunsdon had a surveying background but learned more from his property dealer father, who founded Coldunell in 1959. Dunsdon was renowned as one of the shrewdest operators in the property auction market.
He began his career attending auctions at the Fur Trade House in the City of London, the birthplace of modern auctions, before they moved to the Connaught Rooms in Bloomsbury in the early 1970s.
The business is still owned by his family and trusts. We value the company on its net assets, adding £33m for other wealth to the Dunsdon family.
126= Lord Foster
£150m
Foster Holdings
Lord Foster spent £14.3m recently buying the idyllic Blue Heron Farm on Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast. The house has been a favoured retreat of President Obama for the past three summers.
Foster, regarded as one of the world’s great architects, is best known for buildings such as Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport, the redesigned Reichstag in Berlin, the Hearst Tower in New York and the Gherkin in the City.
In 1967, he set up his own practice, which later became Foster & Partners. Foster had an 85% stake until he sold a 40% stake in 2007, valuing the company at around £300m. Foster should have received around £120m.
Foster & Partners has recovered well from the recession, with strong overseas sales in the Middle East and Asia. In 2010-11, the parent company made an £11m profit on £159m sales. Foster now has around 15.3% of that parent. We still value him at £150m.
126= Eric Gadsden
£150m
WE Black
WE Black caused a stir in Princes Risborough in May when it applied to demolish a former delivery office in the town and turn it into flats. A petition of 3,500 names to keep the delivery office in town had been handed in to the Royal Mail HQ only two months previously.
Eric Gadsden’s Chesham-based property developer, WE Black, made £15.7m profit on £21.9m sales in 2011, a mouth-watering 72% margin. It is worth its near £122m net assets. There are another £36m of net assets in Three Rivers Property Investments and he has a £5m stake in the quoted Michelmersh brick business.
Gadsden, a keen but not entirely successful racing man, should be worth at least £150m in this difficult market.
126= Michael Hunt & family
£150m
Hippo Golf (Europe)
Michael Hunt made his fortune initially by helping to build Nissan UK into one of Britain’s most successful car dealers.
By the late 1980s, the Sussex-based business was making huge profits and was worth more than £1bn. Hunt had a 13% stake before the operation unravelled. But he has a huge property portfolio and was recently fighting a planning order over his property in Canary Wharf, London.
There are some 10 companies with nearly £37.5m net assets, which may be owned or part-owned by the Hunt family.
These include Zanlia, with £22.1m net assets in 2010. The Hunt family is worth £150m.
126= Gerard O’Hare
£150m
O’Hare Developments
Newry entrepreneur Gerard O’Hare is expanding his hugely successful Quays shopping centre in Newry with a £35m extension. The portfolio of his development firm Parker Green International extends from Connecticut to Bratislava and includes the Fairgreen shopping centre in Carlow and the proposed Crystal West development in Waterford.
Much of its expansion was financed by Anglo-Irish Bank. In 1997, O’Hare left his family building firm to work on his own property developments.
He boosted his US interests with two investments in the New York commuter belt valued at more than £125m in July 2007. Parker Green had bought 500 acres of residential building land in New Jersey for £75m.
But cautiously, we clip O’Hare back to £150m in the current climate.
126= Sir Robert Ogden
£150m
Ogden Group
Sir Robert Ogden has been winding down his National Hunt operation, but he is having great success in flat racing. His horse, Thomas Chippendale, recently won Ascot’s King Edward VII Stakes and he has been spending prodigious amounts of money on bloodstock – still, he can afford it and he is a great lover and patron of the turf.
Ogden made his fortune in Yorkshire coal. He sold his coal washing and processing business, A Ogden & Sons, for £24.5m in 2006. The son of a builder, he left school at 15 and, after national service, went into supplying aggregates and later started a site clearance company. He moved into property and was an early investor in the London Docklands. Ogden also saw the potential in slag heaps, extracting coal and redeveloping the land.
His companies, including Ogden Properties, had £41m net assets in 2010. Other assets take Ogden to £150m. He is a generous supporter of Yorkshire charities aimed at pit villages.
133 Sir Richard Sutton & family
£143m
Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates
Sir Richard Sutton is a keen farmer, conservationist and hunter. His Hall Farm in the Lincolnshire Wolds, bought by Settled Estates in the 1960s, has won awards for all three categories and covers 6,000 acres.
Sutton inherited the title from his father in 1981 and runs the property-to-farming group. The Suttons have valuable acreage in Lincolnshire, on London’s Park Lane, the West Country and in the US.
Profits at Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates fell in 2010-11 to £7.6m on £14.6m sales. The estate’s net assets, however, increased to nearly £136.5m. Other assets add £6.5m.
134 Keith Bradshaw & family
£140m
Nurtons Developments
Keith Bradshaw has a large property portfolio held by his Wolverhampton-based property company Nurtons Developments.
He also owns half of Listers of Coventry, an upmarket car dealer, which made £10.1m profit on £621.3m sales in 2010-11. Adding in much of the £5.9m directors’ pay to the bottom line pushes the profit to £15m. With more than £50m net assets, we value the company at around £110m.
Bradshaw made his first fortune after selling the Takare nursing home operation, netting £21m for his stake in 1997.
We can see around £24m net assets in various Bradshaw operations outside Listers. In all, the Bradshaw family should easily be worth £140m.
135 £138m
Stuart Monk & family
Jomast
Regeneration in Middlesbrough will be the winner in the casino development planned for the town, Monk believes. His Jomast Developments has been awarded Middlesbrough’s largest casino licence and it is proposing a development that will transform the 1960s office block Gurney House in the town centre.
The exterior of the building, in Gurney Street, will be completely renewed, the interior will undergo massive changes and a three-storey extension will be added to the front of the building.
The £25m scheme will include a luxury hotel, budget hotel, banqueting facilities, casino and restaurants. A 360-space multistorey car park will be built on the site of the existing Buxton Street car park.
Stockton-based Jomast is on a roll: its profits soared to £7.2m on £16m sales in 2010-11. We value Jomast on its near £136m net assets. Monk and his family own it all. We add £2m for other assets.
136 Sir Tom Farmer
£136m
Morston Assets
Farmer’s Morston Assets is now working on the £500m redevelopment of a former brickworks in West Lothian as a business park and housing scheme. His other investment operations, Halecrest Investments and Maidencraig Investments, showed around £36m net assets in 2010-11.
Farmer trained as an apprentice in engineering, but left in 1964 to found his own firm, which he sold in 1969 for £450,000. He retired to the US, but returned to Scotland and started the Kwik Fit tyre chain in 1971, later selling it in 1999 for £1bn. Farmer netted £78m for his stake.
Farmer retained the freeholds on many Kwik-Fit properties and is now heavily involved in property and other investments. He started Farmer Autocare in 2003 as a mini Kwik-Fit with 17 outlets across Scotland. It made £782,000 profit on £11.3m sales in 2010-11.
Sales of stakes and his ownership of Scottish Premier League football club Hibernian take him to £136m.
137= Peter Horton & family
£135m
Hortons’ Estate
Birmingham’s Grand will be transformed into a luxury hotel as a £30m refurbishment by owner Hortons’ Estate.
Elsewhere, Hortons’ has secured several lettings, including 4,000 sq ft to American Golf in the West Midlands and 20,000 sq ft to 3RDGN at Cursley Distribution Park near Kidderminster.
The family-owned Hortons’ Estate was founded in 1871 by Isaac Horton, a farmer and butcher. It made £8.9m profit on £19.2m sales in the year to September 2011, but the net assets fell from £114.4m to £113.2m.
We value the company at £113m, adding £22m for other assets to the family, led by Peter Horton, who is deputy chairman of the business.
137= Tony Pidgley
£135m
The Berkeley Group
Tony Pidgley’s Berkeley Group benefited from its exposure to London and the South East to post full-year results for 2011-12 showing a 58pc rise in profit to £214.8m while revenue grew 40% to £1bn.
The company is one year into a 10-year plan aimed at returning £13 per share to investors. The company aims to pay its first dividend under the plan in September 2015. During the year Berkeley invested £311m in its land bank.
Since the 30 April year-end, the company has invested a further £150m in a site at News International’s former newspaper headquarters in Wapping.
Pidgley, who calls himself an “old dinosaur”, made his reputation in the early 1990s when he sold his land bank at the top of the market, and cherry-picked the best sites back for a fraction of their price as recession struck. The former Barnardo’s boy has a £91m stake in Berkeley.
For now we value him at £135m with past share sales and other assets.
139 Ron Jelley & family
£133m
Jelson
Leicester housebuilder Jelson made a £1.8m profit on £60.6m sales in 2010-11. Dating back to 1889, it is owned by Ron Jelley and his family, and is worth its £109.3m net assets.
At 85, Jelley has long since retired, but his family owns the company, which specialises in housebuilding in the East Midlands. It has developments in Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Warwickshire.
There are three other family operations – East Goscote Estates, Nanpantan Properties and J Jelley – that have more than £14m of net assets in total. We add £10m for other family assets.
140= Anton Bilton & family
£130m
Raven Russia
“If I were an alien developer from outer space, I’d land my ship right by the Kremlin now,” says Anton Bilton, the British property developer.
His love affair with Russia is about to be tested to the full. In June 2009, his quoted Raven Russia property operation swallowed its former parent company, Raven Mount, to further its huge ambitions in Russia. It has built 13m sq ft of warehouses across Russia since 2005.
Bilton wants to build more and the takeover will give him additional resources to do that. He had an £11m stake in Raven Mount and his stake in Raven Russia is worth around £46m.
Property is in Bilton’s blood. He is the grandson of the late Percy Bilton, the west London property developer, who died in 1983.
Percy had built his own quoted property group (called Percy Bilton, naturally), which was taken over by rival Slough Estates for £270m after a bitter battle in November 1998.
The Bilton family’s 29.4% stake was held via Glenhazel Investment Trust and was worth £79.4m.
With the wider family wealth added to Bilton’s own assets (including a £15m country mansion), a valuation of at least £130m is appropriate.
140= Peter Dawson & family
£130m
Consolidated Property Wilmslow
Property developer Peter Dawson runs Consolidated Property Wilmslow, an Alderley Edge developer.
Consolidated saw its net assets remain at £57.4m in 2010-11. We value the business, owned by Dawson and his family trusts, on the net asset figure.
Dawson is also a director of the separate Gemsupa Ltd, which showed £71m net assets in the same period. It is owned by the Jensal Settlement.
Dawson was the settler and trustee of this trust. We assume that the Dawson family is the ultimate beneficiary of the Jensal Settlement. In all, we value the family at £130m with other assets.
140= Sir Jack Hayward
£130m
Wend Investments
In late 2010 Sir Jack Hayward sold
his 50% stake for around £80m in the Grand Bahama Port Authority, the quasi-governmental authority that runs the second-largest city in the Bahamas.
Hayward settled there in 1956, later using the £26m proceeds from the 1972 sale of the family business to develop Freeport.
He is best known for his love affair with football club Wolverhampton Wanderers. He bought it in 1991 for £2.1m and spent more than £50m on the club until he handed it over to Steve Morgan in 2007 for £10.
Even after this spending, sale proceeds and other property assets should keep Hayward at £130m.
140= Sir John Ritblat & family
£130m
British Land/Delancey
Ritblat chaired British Land from 1970-2006 and built the group into one of the largest quoted property companies in the UK.
Ritblat’s retirement lasted just two weeks and he resurfaced in 2007 when he joined forces with his younger son, Jamie, to spearhead a £2.6bn property investment fund. Ritblat sold most of his stake in British Land for nearly £57m.
He has small stakes worth less than £1m in three small quoted firms.
One of the family companies, Delancey Real Estate Asset Management, saw its profits jump sharply to £5.8m on an £18.3m turnover in 2010-11. The Ritblats should now be worth at least £130m.
144 John Seddon & family
£126m
Seddon Properties
Cheshire-based John Seddon recently won a £60m contract to build 700 affordable homes and a separate £10m contract for maintenance services for Golden Lane Housing, which provides supported housing for people with learning disabilities.
Seddon Group was founded in 1897 by two Lancashire bricklayers and it is now run by the third and fourth generations of the family. In 2011, Seddon Group made an £5.4m profit on £281m sales. It is worth its £93m net assets.
The Seddon family also owns the separate Seddon Properties, which showed £37m net assets in 2011. In all, the wider Seddon family should easily be worth £126m.
145 Robin Clark & family
£124m
Taylor Clark
Taylor Clark, the London-based property, farming, hotels and investment group, made a £10.2m loss on £14.4m sales in 2010-11.
The business is largely owned by the Clark family led by Robin Clark, the son of a prominent 1960s property developer. We value the business on its near £152m net assets. The Underwood Trust, a charity, has a 22.5% stake, which leaves the Clark family’s stake worth around £124m with other assets.
Robin is the chairman of the Underwood Trust, which made donations to a variety of organisations and trusts in excess of £2.5m in the financial year ending April 2011.
146= Chris Marshall & family
£122m
Marshall Holdings
Marshall Holdings has a commercial development arm set up in 1968 by Chris Marshall. It operates mainly in the north of England.
Among its current projects is
Daresbury Park and the Cheshire Business Park. Marshall Holdings itself dates back to 1901 when Marshall’s great grandfather set up a buildings company in Elland outside Leeds.
Still based in the area, the company has grown sharply in recent years as Marshall has long been regarded as one of Yorkshire’s canniest property men.
It’s net assets increased from £90m in 2002 to nearly £160m in 2012. But, in 2011 it wrote down the value of its development properties by over £83.3m. This pushed Marshall Holdings into a £66.9m loss and cut the net assets back to £91.8m.
But, having taken this hit Marshall is confident that the business will return to profitability. It should still easily be worth over £100m. Stakes in smaller companies, past dividends and other assets take Marshall to £122m.
146= David Pearl
£122m
Structadene
David Pearl, the London property entrepreneur, warned of the dangers of eurozone contagion in the 2011 annual report of his Structadene property operation.
There have been reports that Pearl could sell half the business to a private equity buyer. In 2011, Structadene’s profits fell from £22.3m to £5.5m, but net assets rose from £112m to £118m.
Pearl left school at 15 and spent four years packing cardigans into boxes to earn his living, before switching to property on the advice of an estate agent friend. In 1965, he began managing flats and factories and never looked back.
We value Structadene on the net asset figure, adding £4m for other assets to Pearl.
148= Elliott Bernerd
£120m
Chelsfield Investments
The 200,000 sq ft Clarges estate on Piccadilly, W1, has come back to market eight months after going under offer to Sir Stuart Lipton’s and Elliott Bernerd’s investment and development company, Chelsfield Partners.
Bernerd’s company had agreed to buy the prestigious Clarges estate development in September 2011 at 82-84 Piccadilly, for around £170m. The former MI5 office in Mayfair is earmarked for a one-acre
luxury residential scheme to rival One Hyde Park.
Bernerd, who has been treated for mouth cancer, previously ran another Chelsfield operation, which he had founded in 1986, floated on the stock market in 1993 and then took private in 2004, pocketing £45m for selling part of his stake.
He reinvested the rest, worth around £56m in the company, and rapidly sold it again, collecting £82m. He kept the rights to the Chelsfield name.
Bernerd has hefty investments in Europe. Chelsfield Partners reduced its losses in 2010 to £21.6m, but we value him at £120m.
148= Bakir Cola & family
£120m
Cola Holdings
London hotelier and property entrepreneur Bakir Cola owns three London hotels through Cola Holdings. The directors claim the market value of the hotels was £298m as at September 2011. We are more cautious.
Iraq-born Cola spent £30m buying a neighbouring building to his five-star Westbury hotel in London’s Mayfair in 2009 after spending £25m on the hotel’s refurbishment.
Cola bought the 246-room hotel in 1999 for around £90m. He also owns the 550-room Kensington Close hotel.
Cola runs and owns Cola Holdings, which made £8.3m profit on £50m sales in 2011. It has £30m net assets.
Past dividends and other assets take the Cola family to £120m.
148= The Marquess of Northampton
£120m
The Canonbury Academy
The five-times married aristocrat has suffered a hefty loss as the result of a bitter divorce battle. His estranged wife has already been offered £15m, but is said to want a further £10m.
The 3,221-acre Tandridge and Chelsham Estates in Surrey was sold for £25m. It means a handy windfall for Northampton, who also has country estates in Warwickshire, Northampton and Surrey, covering 18,500 acres. The marquess also has at least one London home on an exclusive square, as well as property in Islington, north London.
In 1985, two years after his divorce to wife number three, Rosie, he sold the Adoration of the Magi by 15th-century artist Andreas Mantegna, for a then world record £8.1m despite protests over its export to the Getty Museum in California.
With the Tandridge £25m sale proceeds and firm land prices, we value Northampton at £120m.
148= Phyllis Somers
£120m
PS Webber
Phyllis Somers is the widow of Nat Somers, who died in March 1998. A Jersey-based tycoon, he had two passions – flying and business. He later owned airports, but real success came in 1988, when he sold Southampton airport for £50m. His numerous property deals were testament to a £120m fortune
Following his death, we assign his fortune to his widow. She is a director of small company, PS Webber, and is also a generous donor to many charitable causes.
148= Gerard Versteegh & family
£120m
Gerard Versteegh Holdings
From his mid-20s, Versteegh has been involved in the London property market.
The low-key Swede has some asset-rich companies where he is a director, led by Gestrix Ltd, which showed £191m net assets in 2006. It only showed modified accounts in 2007, but a £12.7m profit. It is now dormant and no new accounts are available. It is owned by a Jersey-based parent, but we assume that it is largely owned by the Versteegh family.
Another dissolved Versteegh company, Anglo Scandinavian Estates, showed more than £95m net assets in 2006. In the current climate we keep the Versteegh family at £120m.
