David Wilson
Wilson Bowden
Leicester builder and property group Wilson Bowden could attract takeover interest after it said in July 2006 that NM Rothschild was reviewing the 33% stake in the business held by the family of David Wilson, its chairman and founder. The sale of the stake could trigger takeover interest from rivals.
Meanwhile, Wilson Bowden is revamping Barnsley Market in a £180m joint venture with Ashcroft Estates and Guildhouse Group. Work will start in 2008.
It is also involved in an £80m new town scheme on the old Ravenscraig steel works site south of Glasgow. In Glasgow city centre, it has teamed up with Selfridges to develop a site for a store and housing.
Wilson floated Wilson Bowden on the stock market in 1987.
The company’s shares have held their own in recent market turmoil and Wilson’s stake is now worth £451m. With nearly £50m of share sales since the flotation and nearly £48m in dividends since 2001, we value Wilson, 64, at £520m.
Eddie & Sol Zakay
Topland Group
Topland, the property investment company run by Sol and Eddie Zakay, aged 54 and 56 respectively, sold a Basingstoke retail warehouse store to Legal & General for £26m last October just three years after buying it for £13.8m, reflecting the commercial property boom that has engulfed Britain.
Earlier, in April, Thistle Hotels, the biggest hotel group in London, sold six hotels to Topland for £185m. It was the first hotel deal by Topland, which has made its name through sale-and-leaseback deals on more conventional properties with companies such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco. It bought 33 supermarkets and two distribution centres from Tesco and leased them back to the supermarket giant in a £675m joint-venture deal.
The Zakays are active in both the British and European markets. They have around 168 directorships but the main holding company, Topland Group, made £5.1m profit on nearly £31.5m sales in 2004-05 when it had around £504m net assets. Their total portfolio has been put at £4bn, but after borrowings we value the Zakays at around £517m.
Sir Donald Gosling
Hildane Properties
The sale of National Car Parks in July 2005 for £550m was the third time it had changed hands. But for original owners Sir Donald Gosling and Ronald Hobson, there was no windfall this time.
The pair started NCP in 1948 as postwar Britain started to recover. In the first sale of NCP, 50 years later, Gosling made £290m for his stake. An old salt, Gosling, 77, served in the Navy as a signalman in HMS Leander after the war. The sea has remained his passion and his latest yacht, also called Leander, is not much smaller than a cruiser at 245 ft in length.
But Gosling should have no worries about running costs. Aside from NCP, he had a 40% stake in a property company, Consolidated Property Investments, which was sold in 2004 for £77m. More recently, Gosling and Hobson sold their Metrose property operation for £112m. Years of hefty dividends, and his current holdings (Hildane Properties) and sale proceeds, easily take Gosling to £510m.
Jane Clarke & Family
C Le Masurier
Professional managers are helping the Clarke family to tidy up their huge Jersey property portfolio. The family, now the largest private landowner on Jersey, has large tracts of St Helier, retail outlets and pub sites across the island.
The death in 2001 of Fred Clarke led to the reorganisation of assets and a focus on raising asset values. Jane Clarke, his daughter and a formidable businesswoman in her own right, is the business head of the family and we put her here as representing the family as a whole. C Le Masurier’s wine and spirit interests have been sold, and further disposals are likely.
We value the Clarke assets at £500m, but our spies in Jersey say this could ultimately be a billionaire family and those now involved in valuing the assets are astonished by the depth and breadth of what the late Fred Clarke had cannily assembled.
Remo Dipre & Family
Gladedale
Remo Dipre, 72, started out as a developer in 1972 and has never stopped. The Italian-born boss of Gladedale, an Epsom-based developer and housebuilder, reckons he has created Britain’s largest privately owned housebuilder, which is growing at between 25% and 30% a year.
In 2005, Gladedale took listed rival Country & Metropolitan private for £72m, the latest in a string of deals that have extended its geographical reach and allowed it to go for larger projects such as Edinburgh’s Quartermile, a joint-venture development with Royal Bank of Scotland.
In 2005, profits at Gladedale rose by £20m to £61.7m on a £475m turnover. It should be worth £600m on these figures but it does have hefty borrowings and we cut our valuation to £500m. Dipre and his family own it all.
The Duke of Bedford
Bedford Estates
Bedford has inherited the entrepreneurial skills of his grandfather and father. He inherited the title and estate from his father, the 14th duke, who died in 2003, and, at just 44, is well versed in the management of the extraordinary 3,000-acre Woburn Abbey estate and house.
The Harrow- and Harvard-educated duke has various successful business ventures under his control at Woburn, which were set up by his grandfather to pay a £4.5m bill for death duties.
His late father left just £39.1m in his will, but we assume that much of the estate had been handed over some years ago as part of the family’s tax planning. Ironically, the late duke had just made a £7.2m profit on the sale of his stake in a quoted property group, Compco, when he died.
Though we can see just £15.6m net assets in four family companies, including Woburn Enterprises, the house and grounds must easily be worth £100m. But it is the art treasures inside, including 24 Canalettos, that are particularly valuable. Our art expert puts a £300m value on the total collection. But in line with our art policy we halve that to £150m to allow for any inheritance tax in the event of a sale.
Bedford also has his London estate to fall back on. Bedford Estates owns 170 properties in and around Bedford Square in central London. A £200m price-tag was recently put on these when the former chief executive of Compco joined Bedford Estates to help boost its value. Properties outside London will be disposed of and new ones bought in the capital. Allowing for any inheritance tax following his father’s death, we stick with a £490m valuation for the current duke.
Ronald Hobson
Metrose Property
Ronald Hobson is on a roll in the property market. In September 2005, he and his partner, Sir Donald Gosling, sold their property company, Metrose Property, for £112m to Invesco UK Property Income Trust. A little more than a year earlier, they had sold Consolidated Property Investments for £77m. The low-key Hobson should have made around £97m from the two deals.
Hobson, 85, originally teamed up with Gosling after the war to build car parks on old bomb sites in London and the rest of Britain. They sold the parent company, National Parking Corporation, in 1998 for £801m, collecting around £290m each. Huge dividends prior to that, plus the recent property company sales, push Hobson up to £470m this year.
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No |
Name |
Wealth (£m) |
|
148 |
Maurice Wohl |
100 |
|
232 |
John Byrne |
64 |
|
40 |
Ronald Hobson |
470 |
|
379 |
Philip J Davies |
57 |
|
258 |
Sir Sigmund Sternberg |
55 |
Steve Morgan
Harrow Estates
Steve Morgan’s efforts to take a controlling stake in his beloved Liverpool Football Club have come to naught so far. The board has consistently rejected his overtures and he withdrew his £70m offer last year.
Morgan, 53, who hails from Merseyside, is a passionate supporter and has a 5.1% stake. He can certainly afford such a move. Having started his career as a labourer on a building site, Morgan set up a small construction business in 1974 with a £5,000 loan from his father. Twenty years later, as one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, Redrow was floated.
Morgan retains a stake worth over £56m, but he sold almost £240m worth of shares in the float and afterwards, when he left the Redrow board, in 2000. He also had a stake in the De Vere leisure group, which was the subject of a bidding battle in the summer of 2005. The battle was won by developer Richard Balfour-Lynn, who bid £750m for the group and bought Morgan’s stake for around £100m. Morgan’s Liverpool stake is worth £3m. He also recently shared £75m sale proceeds on a Spanish development with Peter Thomas.
Though based in Jersey, Morgan is no retired tax exile. He is heavily involved in development work locally, in mainland Britain and Europe, putting in 80-hour weeks.
His latest venture is Harrow Estates, which, aside from property investments, specialises in buying derelict land, cleaning it up and selling it on at a huge profit. It is starting work on a scheme in Cambridgeshire which could be worth £100m in 2010/11 when completed.
After allowing for reinvestment of his Redrow money, his Jersey property, and his developments, Morgan is easily worth £450m — enough to take over Liverpool.
Dieter Bock
Trizec Hann Europe
German businessman Dieter Bock, 67, first came to prominence in the early 1990s when, as an investor in Lonrho, he managed to out-manoeuvre the legendary Tiny Rowland for control of the quoted conglomerate.
Bock left Lonrho four years later, in 1997, to become president of Trizec Hann Europe and vice-chairman and a director of Trizec Hann, one of North America’s largest property companies. He traded properties in exchange for a 4% stake in Trizec Hann.
In the list of Germany’s richest 300 people, compiled in 2005 by Manager Magazine, Bock’s fortune was put at £445m. He lives in London and qualifies for this list as a result.
Freddie Linnett & The Murphy Family
Charles Street Buildings
Profits at Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) rose to £36.5m on £37m sales in 2004, a robust 98.34% margin. The net assets at the family-owned property group also rose to a healthy £315.7m.
Freddie Linnett, 56, is a director and leading shareholder in the business, started by her uncles, who came to Britain from Ireland after the war. When the uncles died, Linnett inherited their stakes.
We value the business at £370m even today. Other assets and £62m of dividends, from 1995 to 2004 inclusive, take Linnett and the Leicester-based Murphy family to £430m.
Mark Dixon
Regus
Mark Dixon, 46, was able to reunite the UK arm of Regus with the rest of the company in an £88m deal in April 2006.
Dixon had to sell 58% of the UK arm to venture capitalist group Alchemy for £57m in 2002 after many of the serviced offices company’s clients went bust in the dot-com collapse.
The UK operation has 91 businesses with space for 25,000 workers, and ran at 70% capacity in 2005. It was proof of the continuing revival of the Surrey-based operation.
In 2005, after four years of hefty losses, it turned in a £38.7m profit. That was a triumph for Dixon, the man who founded Regus in 1989.
A former sandwich and later hamburger salesman, he formed the company with the sale proceeds of earlier businesses.
Regus floated on the stock market in 2000. The shares soared initially, making Dixon a billionaire on paper. But his wealth collapsed four years ago when the shares went into free-fall after hasty over-expansion.
But Dixon has confounded his critics — his stake is now worth £364m. With other assets and the proceeds of an earlier £61m share sale before the flotation, he is easily worth £430m.
Robert Edmiston
IM Group
With bumper profits pouring into Edmiston’s Birmingham-based car distribution and property operations, Bob Edmiston was able to give away over £27m to the charity Christian Vision in 2003. But he does not just believe in evangelical good works, and has pledged £2m to a new school in Solihull that will help disadvantaged kids.
He sees nothing wrong with serving Mammon and God, telling The Sunday Times recently: “In earlier times, wealth was seen as the blessing of God, and many great Old Testament figures were wealthy and did great things with their wealth, so we need to recover the balance. It’s what we do with the wealth which really counts.”
An accountant by trade, who once worked for the now-defunct Jensen luxury sports car operation, Edmiston is one of Britain’s biggest importers of Far Eastern cars. His IM Group made £7.8m profit on £309m sales in 2004 and saw its net assets fall from £198m to just under £144m. But the fall in net assets came about as Edmiston demerged his finance business, The Funding Corporation Group, from IM and into his own control as a separate operation.
We add the £60m funding for that transfer to Edmiston’s wealth. The separate IM Properties made £32.2m profit on £28.32m sales in 2004. It has a strong asset base too, with £181.2m net assets. In all, the companies are worth their £385m net assets. Edmiston, who owns all the companies, has had £62m of salaries and pension contributions since 1999. In all, he should be worth £410m, allowing for tax and his huge charitable giving.
Edmiston, 60, has turned his £2m loan to the Tory party into a donation. His peerage nomination had been blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which objected because of a dispute with HM Revenue & Customs over Edmiston’s imports of cars from the Far East. But the dispute has now been resolved and Edmiston’s name will feature on the next list of Tory working peers.
Charlotte Townshend
Addison Developments
Charlotte Townshend became the high sheriff of Dorset in April, which means she has to undertake a large number of ceremonial duties on behalf of the Queen. Her business interests seem to be going pretty well, too.
Addison Developments, her property company, made a healthy £580,000 profit in 2004-05 and showed £8.4m net assets. In all, her six farming and property companies showed nearly £14.5m net assets in 2004-05. In June 2005, one of them, Ilchester Estates, sold a complex of Essex offices and shops for £5.14m.
Aged only 15, Townshend inherited 20 acres of choice London land round Holland Park from her father, the ninth Viscount Galway. In 1990, she inherited £40m in her mother’s will, plus 15,000 Dorset acres and 3,000 in Nottinghamshire. The latter have been sold for a reputed £9m.
The improvement in her companies, rising London prices in quality areas, the performance of her racehorse Made in Montot and sales from her bloodstock interests lead us to raise Townshend, 51, to £390m this year.
Leo Noe
REIT Asset Management
Britain’s most active and astute property player is turning his attention to India. REIT Asset Management, in which Leo Noe (below) has a stake, is setting up an office there with a view to investing up to £700m in the booming local property market.
Noe, 53, based in London, is known for his shrewd reading of the market. While we can see around £86m of net assets in companies owned by the Noe family, such as Agra, Flathost and Landmaster Properties, the extent of their deals and investments indicate more substantial wealth.
Early in 2006, for example, Reit Asset Management sold its Fosse Retail Park for £360m, just a year after buying it for £307m. In 2004, it sold three shopping centres for £378.5m, which it had bought in 2002-03 for £294m. Perhaps the most high-profile acquisition was the £283m purchase of the St Katharine Docks complex in London in early 2004. It is now being redeveloped at a cost of around £118m.
There are borrowings attached to some of the purchases, but the way that Noe is able to extract hefty profits from his skilful deals easily takes his fortune to £380m.
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A few interesting statistics |
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|
Gross wealth of Top 400 |
£79.07bn |
|
Number of women in list, either alone or with partners |
25 |
|
Self-made wealth |
316 |
|
Inherited wealth (based on 400 entries) |
84 |
|
Worth more than £1bn |
15 |
Mendi & Moises Gertner
Fordgate
Mendi and Moises Gertner added £175m to their fortune in July 2006 after the London flotation of Nikanor, a copper mine based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The brothers, who only a month earlier made an estimated £39m profit from the sale of the headquarters of Liffe, London’s main derivatives market, own about 22% of Nikanor. Yet it is still property that seems to attract them.
In December 2005, they raised £215.65m directly from the capital markets by issuing bonds secured against seven properties they own.
They recently sold 1 America Square to the State of Qatar for £110m, only a year after buying it from Japanese investor Shimizu for £93m. Based in London, their main company, Orgate, saw its net assets increase to £66.2m in 2003-04.
But other stakes add another £10m in companies we can see. The Gertners also have substantial assets in the US and Europe. With the Nikanor flotation and Liffe profit, we raise our valuation of Moises, 49, and Mendi, 47, to £360m.
Tony Gallagher
AC Gallagher
Midlands-based Gallagher is quietly developing many major retail and residential projects throughout Britain. The company, owned and run by Tony Gallagher, owns land which has planning consents or allocations for 32,000 residential plots, probably the largest privately owned strategic residential land bank in Britain.
The group promotes large development projects and then sells fully serviced residential housing land in small parcels to volume residential housebuilders. It will deliver whole new towns in Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, which will have up to 10,000 homes, and Elstow in Bedfordshire, which will have 7,000 new homes.
Gallagher also owns 3m sq ft of retail parks let to blue chip companies including B&Q, Carpetright, Next, Arcadia and JJB Sports. Gallagher’s portfolio is the largest privately owned retail park portfolio in the UK, and this is an asset class whose growth has outperformed all others in the commercial property sector during the course of the past five years.
Gallagher, who is 54, is now looking at expanding his property investment business into large cities in Europe.
In all, we value the low-key Gallagher at £350m.
Don & Roy Richardson
Swiftfire
For the past 18 months, the 76-year-old Richardson twins have been developing shopping centres near and far. In 2005, they opened a £107m development near Rome, a £167m centre in Broadstairs, Kent, and Rope Walk in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, valued at £72m.
In 2006, the plan is to complete and open shopping centres such as Met Quarter, Liverpool; Barberino, near Florence in Italy; and another in Salzburg, Austria.
Three years ago, the Richardsons spent £221m buying a stake in five big designer outlet centres in Europe. But it is in Birmingham and the Black Country where they have made their fortune. Not for nothing are they called “kings of Dudley”.
Born within the shadow of the old Dudley steelworks, the twins left school at 14 and started trading in ex-Army vehicles with their father, later moving into transport and property. They are best known in the Midlands for developing the Merry Hill shopping centre, which they sold in 1992 for a £50m profit. Since then, they have been involved in scores of flagship projects in the Midlands.
Their main company, Swiftfire, saw its profit fall slightly from £13.9m to £11.2m in 2004, but that was after £10m was disbursed in directors’ pay. It has £135.8m of net assets (up £8m) and we value the business on that figure.
Yet, after the acquisition of the European assets and taking account of other deals and £54m of salaries in recent years, we reckon the Richardsons are now worth a net £350m.
John Madejski
Sackville Properties
Reading FC has stormed into the Premiership for the first time in the club’s 135-year history. The man who has bankrolled the club for 16 years is John Madejski.
Property deals now help to underwrite his football challenge. Madejski, 65, has a 70% stake in Sackville Properties, which increased profits to £2.2m in 2004-05. In early 2006, it bought a site in Warwick which it will turn into a £120m development. Last year, it acquired more than 30 properties from the Tchenguiz brothers’ Rotch Property Group for £100m. It also bought the eight-property GPF Portfolio for £60m from Frogmore.
Madejski’s other interests include publishing, the Reading 107FM radio station, a bottling plant in China, and Goodhead Group, a quoted printer.
He is easily worth £350m now, despite the heavy drain on his finances of running a football club, donations to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the near £2m he is putting into the John Madejski Academy in Reading.
Jon Hunt
Heven Holdings
Profits at Foxtons, the London-based estate agency, rose sharply in 2005 to over £8.8m. Foxtons has had a good run with the rise in London house prices and the buoyant market in recent years. Its parent, Heven Holdings, is owned entirely by Jon Hunt, 53, who started in property at 17. A formidable estate agent, Hunt has also taken Foxtons into the US, where its 3% commission is half that charged by rivals. To make the US operation viable, it needs to increase volumes sharply. In 2004, the Heven Holdings annual report revealed that hefty marketing spending, a revamp of Foxtons USA and the opening of new branches had pushed losses up from $3.6m (£1.9m) to $5.6m (£2.9m). Last year, we valued the two businesses together at £240m. We stick with that figure until the US operation becomes profitable. Hunt has also been buying more property in the past year. He now has a £14m London mansion to add to his East Anglian estate. With a £4m dividend in 2004, we keep Hunt at £347m.
Harry Hyams
Walton Investment Co
Art and antiques worth up to £30m were stolen from Harry Hyams’ West Country estate in February. The raid was a blow for the low-key Hyams, 78, who made his fortune from property.
Although no longer the titan he once was, Hyams still has stakes in a number of small property companies. We can see five such companies with around £11m of net assets in 2004-05. Hyams is also involved in the £200m revamp of Newcastle city centre.
Best known for the 1970s Centre Point 35-storey tower in central London, his real coup was to buy a stake in the Oldham Estates group in 1959 for £50,000. When it was taken over in 1988 by the MEPC property giant, he received £150m. Hyams made a further £98m when MEPC itself was taken over in 2000. His estate, the net assets in the small Hyams companies, and his remaining art should easily take him to £320m.
The Shepherd Family
Shepherd Building Group
Axiom Education, a consortium sponsored by Shepherd Building Group and Dutch bank ABN AMRO, was chosen as the preferred bidder for the Rochdale Grouped Schools private finance initiative project — beating off two other competitors — in May 2005. The £57m deal will be one of the largest ever for Shepherd and shows how important PFI work is becoming for the British construction industry. A much better 2004-05 saw York-based Shepherd Building Group’s profits rise from £30.3m to £35m on sales up from £603.4m to £644.2m. But then, quality always wins in the end and, since its inception in 1890, Shepherd Building has been noted for its good workmanship on its sites and in its property developments. The firm is still owned by the Shepherd family and we value it at £300m on these figures, adding £20m to the Shepherds for past dividends.
Michael Evans & Family
Evans Property Holdings
Evans Business Centres are springing up all over the country as part of a determined expansion by the Leeds-based developer. The latest, and 28th, is at Peterborough.
The expansion has meant that Evans Property Holdings, the new parent company for the Evans’ family property interests, is doing very nicely on the financial front. Its 2004-05 figures show a sharp leap in net assets from £228.5m to £287.8m, while profits rose from £18.5m to £20.5m.
Michael Evans, 70, heads the low-key Leeds-based family, which is heavily involved in development work all over the north of England. His late father, refusing to go into the family’s tailoring operation, started Evans of Leeds as a transport firm but moved into housebuilding and property. He was still hard at work in his 90s.
The Evans family took the company private in 1999 in a deal which valued it then at £164m. The family has 98% of the shares, worth over £281m. We add £30m for other assets and past dividends.
Grahame Whateley
Castlemore Securities
From Beverley in Yorkshire to former gaswork sites in south and west London, by way of Edinburgh and Sheffield, Grahame Whateley is planning or working on developments on a grand scale through his Castlemore Securities property operation. Whateley, 63, is now Britain’s largest developer of out-of-town retail schemes.
Based in Halesowen, Birmingham, Whateley did his first deal in 1969. Today, Castlemore is working on 10m sq ft of new space worth over £1bn. In the year to September 2005, Castlemore net assets rose from £119m to over £155m and to more than £200m by July 2006.
Whateley’s other assets include Cedar Group, a separate property operation, with £60m net assets and a £4m stake in Arden Partners, an AIM-quoted stockbroking firm he backed. Whateley’s other property trusts and private assets should take him to £300m easily.
Robert Rayne & Family
London Merchant Securities
London Merchant Securities completed the demerger of its Leo Capital venture arm in June 2006 and said rents in the West End of London were on the rise. Chief executive Robert Rayne said the move towards increasing rents in London was a trend, not a blip.
Property revaluations helped LMS to lift profits from £54m to £173m. Rayne, 57, has been at the helm of LMS since the death of his father, LMS founder Lord Rayne, in 2003. His death robbed London of one of its shrewdest property developers. After the war, Lord Rayne turned his family’s tailoring operation into a property business and pioneered development on the fringe of the City.
Lord Rayne left £119.6m in his British will, which excludes assets in France. The shares in LMS have soared recently and the family stake is now worth £190m, which will include a large part of Lord Rayne’s estate. The family stake in Leo Capital is now worth around £70m. We add another £30m for other assets and past dividends, taking the family to perhaps £290m.
