Property’s surviving super rich are marching in the right direction again: onwards and upwards. Two painful years wiped almost £30bn off their collective wealth, taking the top 250 property titans from a high of £98bn in 2007 to a low of £69bn last year. But, for most, the recovery is now feeding through. The 2010 Estates Gazette Rich List scrutinised empires worth a total of £72bn – still way below the peak of the boom but a not insignificant improvement.
Leading the charge are inevitably those with low borrowings and solid assets – witnessed by the resilience of the big London estates such as Grosvenor, Cadogan and Howard de Walden, all of which have seen their fortunes rise. But these centuries-old piggy banks are not the only ones in credit. Assets acquired far more recently put consummate deal makers like David and Simon Reuben and Richard and Ian Livingstone among the top performers.
Not everyone is seeing a recovery of fortune, however. The Irish feature heavily among those who fell several notches down the list. And they continue to be hammered. Many of the financial records and accounts that we use in the compilation of the list are historical, so events such as the restructuring of Ireland’s property debts by “bad bank” NAMA (the National Asset Management Agency) can overtake us.
That said, the list provides an unmatched snapshot of how property’s elite stand in the wake of the downturn. We hope you find it useful. If you have any comments, please contact our number cruncher Dr Philip Beresford directly at philipberesford@aol.com.
Scroll down to read profiles of the people featured in this year’s Rich List, or click here to view the special Estates Gazette Rich List supplement as a PDF.
1. The Duke of Westminster
£6,800m
Grosvenor Group
2009: £6,500m (+£300m)
Grosvenor Group, the property giant controlled by the 58-year-old Duke of Westminster, is expected to make around £55m from its joint venture development of 197 flats just behind the Tate Modern on Bankside.
Its success prompted Grosvenor to enter into a second joint venture to pay £100m for the two-acre Holland Park Comprehensive School site. Some 72 upmarket flats will be built when the pupils vacate it in three years’ time.
Grosvenor, which owns swathes of Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge, reported pretax losses in 2009 of £236m.
This was down sharply from its £594m pretax losses the previous year, when it was still making provisions for the costly Liverpool One development.
The group has also built up a war chest of nearly £1bn to return to global property markets such as Shanghai and other Chinese cities. It has, according to chief executive Mark Preston, “weathered the downturn well”.
He said that the group had been around for more than 300 years, experiencing 20 recessions and more than 250 wars worldwide during that time.
The Grosvenor Group shares are owned by various Grosvenor trusts set up for the benefit of the family, which is now headed by the sixth duke, who stood down as chairman of the board in 2007 after 33 years in the role, although he remains chairman of the trustees.
The net asset value of the Grosvenor Group fell sharply in 2009 to under £2.4bn.
However, with the private estates outside the group added, and with the top end of the London housing market now in recovery mode (as the Tate Modern sales show), we raise our overall valuation of Westminster slightly to £6.8bn this year.
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2. David & Simon Reuben
£5,432m
Aldersgate
2009: £3,300m (+£2,132m)
David and Simon Reuben are hoping to implement long-standing plans to float their fast-growing data-centre company, Global Switch, next year with a value of more than £2.75bn.
The brothers are in talks with banks including Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche and Credit Suisse, about listing the business which has soared in value recently. The strong performance has been spurred by regulatory requirements that have increased the need for companies to retain more data and back-up IT facilities as part of their disaster recovery plans.
Global Switch has centres in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Sydney and Singapore, covering almost 3m sq ft. It lets space to big blue-chip companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Shell and BP.
The business, one of the brothers’ most successful investments, has less than £80m of debt and is on track to generate underlying earnings of £175m in 2010-11. That figure is expected to grow to £235m by the following year.
The Reubens have been active in the British property market for the last decade after making their fortune in Russia in the 1990s, where they were dubbed the “metal tsars” for their role in restructuring the aluminium industry there. Their origins were anything but regal. Born in Bombay, they made their way to London, where Simon, now 69, went into property and David, 72, started trading in scrap metal. Their foray into Russia, which ended in 1999, earned them at least £1.3bn.
Today, their vast interests include a 29.5% stake in racecourse owner Arena Leisure, and the joint venture Merchant Square development in Paddington. They have extracted hefty profits from property investments sold before the market crash.
Their two main companies, Aldersgate and Reuben Brothers, are now valued at more than £5.5bn. Despite the recent failure of their Sapphire Retail Fund, other assets take the Reubens to £5.432bn.
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3. Earl Cadogan & Family
£2,500m
The Cadogan Group
2009: £2,000m (+£500m)
Earl Cadogan is confident that the property company which runs his 93 plush acres in Chelsea has the “fundamental resilience” to come through the deep property downturn.
It recently began drawing up plans for a 100,000 sq ft office development above shops on Sloane Street.
The 2009 accounts showed a rise in net assets from £2.1bn to £2.3bn, though profits fell slightly from £40.4m to £38m.
The crowning glory is the new £150m redevelopment of the old barracks and sports ground at Duke of York Square on fashionable Kings Road.
The foundation of the Cadogan Estate was laid in 1713 when the physician Sir Hans Sloane bought the Manor of Chelsea.
In 1717, Sloane’s younger daughter, Elizabeth, married Charles Cadogan, later the Second Baron Cadogan of Oakley. The present Earl Cadogan, 73, began his career at merchant bank Schroder Wagg and took on the management of the family’s property portfolio in 1974.
Having inherited the title from his late father in 1997, Cadogan has presided over a hefty investment programme covering the Cadogan estate. Cautiously, with recovery in the air in the upmarket London acreage, we value the business on its net assets figure.
Past dividends, quoted investments held by the separate Cadogan Settled Estates, personal property and estates should take Cadogan to £2.5bn.
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4. Eddie & Sol Zakay
£1,900m
Topland Group
2009: £1,500m (+£400m)
Topland Group swung from a £29m loss to a £5.3m profit in the year to May 2009. It should see further improvement this year after taking advantage of renewed investor appetite by concluding a number of UK property sales.
The Zakays launched their business during the 1980s’ property boom before expanding into the American and Middle Eastern markets. They made much of their fortune in the UK in a series of multi-million pound deals with chains such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco.
The Zakays have around 146 directorships and their total portfolio world-wide has been valued at around £4bn. In all, after stripping out borrowings, the Zakay family should still be worth £1.9bn in the current climate.
Sol has quit Britain after the introduction of a 50% tax rate on high earners. He recently resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of Topland Group and the UK Topland companies to join the group’s offshore parent company as a consultant.
The Topland business, built with his brother Eddie, will remain in the UK. Eddie, 60, is to become chairman of the UK businesses and stay in England. Sol, 58, will concentrate on finding global opportunities.
Topland has also spent £289m buying supermarkets in Spain, and has become involved in a £1bn housebuilding fund in India to target the country’s burgeoning middle class and its demand for home ownership. It has £1.2bn in the bank.
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5. Sir David & Sir Frederick Barclay
£1,800m
Ellerman Investments
2009: £1,000m (+£800m)
The Barclay brothers are investing in a vineyard on the island of Sark with the hope of producing a vintage worthy of the wine list at their exclusive Ritz Hotel in London.
Their mission is so serious that they have recruited a leading Bordeaux winemaker to take charge of the project. It is a sign of how much the brothers are determined to make their extensive assets “sweat.”
At the same time, their Home Delivery Network bought the parcels division of DHL to create a £600m turnover operation which will be a strong competitor to Royal Mail.
The oncelow-key Barclays have become much more prominent in British business since their £665m purchase of the Telegraph Group in 2004.
The twins, 76, started on the road to wealth in the 1960s London property market. Their first coup came in 1983 when they bought the Ellerman Lines for £48m. They later sold the assets making over £250m.
They made a £100m profit on the sale of a separate shipping line and another £100m from backing Sir Philip Green in the break up of Sears in 1999.
By some adroit deals in retailing, they gained the valuable Littlewoods mail order business for a total outlay of around £340m.
Although the Barclays’ main operations in media, hotels, property and retailing have had mixed fortunes in the recession, we can see much higher net assets of more than £2bn in their four main but separate companies led by Ellerman Investments, which had £728m net assets in 2008.
With economic recovery, we raise our valuation of the Barclays to £1,800m, which takes account of both personal assets and borrowings in their empire.
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6.Ian & Richard Livingstone
£1,650m
London & Regional Group Holdings
2009: £1,400m (+£250m)
The Livingstone brothers have been stepping up their activity in the UK property market over the past 18 months.
Their London & Regional business has recently teamed up with Chelsfield Partners to buy a stake in the £1bn redevelopment of Elizabeth House in Waterloo, and the brothers have added to their hotel empire with the £50m purchase of the Marriott Marble Arch hotel.
They should be well cushioned against the worst effects of the recession and credit crunch, having taken £619m in dividends since 2007 from their Loopsign company.
Ian, 48, who began life as an optician, purchased and built up the David Clulow chain which now owns more than 50 opticians and is overseen by the Optika Clulow Group, which he still chairs.
Younger brother Richard, 45, was a chartered surveyor for Richard Ellis, now CB Richard Ellis, and the pair formed London & Regional in the early 1990s, buying distressed assets in the midst of the commercial property crash.
The brothers shun publicity but their empire stretches from Russia in the east to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the west. They own more than 60 hotels with around 10,000 bedrooms, more than half of Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront shopping development, and a string of health clubs including David Lloyd Leisure.
Loopsign’s 2009 profits came in at £12.1m on £390.3m sales. Its net assets fell sharply to £690m. We value it at £750m. Past dividends and other assets take the Livingstones to £1.65bn.
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7. Mark Pears & Family
£1,600m
William Pears Family Holdings
2009: £1,500m (+£100m)
The Pears family is moving into banking. The low-key London-based brothers are backing a new Home and Savings Bank to the tune of £50m.
The move comes after they pulled off a coup in January 2009 by buying the Trillium outsourcing business for £750m from Land Securities, merging it with their own Telereal operation. The price was around £250m less than LandSec had hoped to achieve. The deal reflects the strength of cash-rich groups like the Pears in a difficult market.
The family empire was started by the grandfather and father of the Pears brothers, in 1952. He had assembled a Hampstead-based property empire that now embraces thousands of London homes, flats, and office blocks.
The three young Pears were propelled to run the family empire when their father and ace dealmaker, Clive Pears, died in his early 50s. Mark is managing director of the main company, William Pears Family Holdings, but there are at least 23 separate companies which showed around £835m net assets in 2008-09. The family also owns fund management group Talisman.
A portfolio of more than 50 buildings let to Royal Bank of Scotland – including the Strand HQ of top private bank Coutts – was put on the market by the Pears family at the beginning of this year with a £475m price tag. The value of their entire portfolio has been put at £6bn.
The Pears are also not short of a bob or two, with dividends of £40m in the last four years and nearly £82m in 1996. With economic recovery, we nudge the Pears up to £1.6bn.
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8. Poju Zabludowicz
£1,500m
Tamares Real Estate Investments (UK)
New entry
Property magnate Poju Zabludowicz gave two donations totalling £100,000 to the Conservative Party last autumn to help swell the party’s election war-chest. Zabludowicz holds a Finnish passport, but has lived and worked in London for most of his life.
His father Shlomo, a holocaust survivor, built the family business around Soltam, an Israeli defence contractor that was a major supplier to the Israeli military. Most of the defence interests have now been off-loaded and the family has diversified into Las Vegas property and hotels.
Zabludowicz, 57, has sold many of his Las Vegas assets but still holds some downtown real estate. He recently sold a property called the Princess Arcade on Piccadilly for around £120m. He has a number of companies including Tamares Real Estate Investments and Ivory Gate. Zabludowicz has also moved into private equity with the launch of Synova Capital, an £80m fund which will invest in small UK companies.
Equity investments in areas such as card payment technology have also proved lucrative for Zabludowicz, who is a major modern art collector and on the board of several Jewish/Israeli charities. Zabludowicz campaigns to improve the portrayal of Israel in the West and counts Bill Clinton and Shimon Perez among his friends. Though there is little evidence of asset wealth in his British companies, we believe Zabludowicz is worth £1.5bn.
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9. John Caudwell
£1,400m
Caudwell Holdings
New entry
John Caudwell’s buying spree in the last three months of 2008, when he spent £80m on properties in London and elsewhere, looks to have been well timed.
But he could easily afford to take such a gamble, having sold his Caudwell Group in 2006 to Providence Equity Partners for £1.46bn, a far higher price than had been expected for the Stoke-based mobile phone operation.
It was in 1970 that Caudwell took his first job as an engineering apprentice. He’d quit school the year before after a term of A-Levels with a burning desire to get out, on, up and rich.
While waiting for his Michelin apprenticeship to start, he swept pottery floors, worked at a steel factory and as a night club bouncer. Eventually he became a successful car dealer but his path to serious money came through an early move into the fledgling mobile phone industry in 1987.
When he sold up, Caudwell was the biggest independent player in the European mobile phone industry. His 85% stake in the business was worth around £1.24bn at the sale price. Two years previously he had sold off his Singlepoint customer billing operation to Vodafone for £405m.
Caudwell, 58, has retained a financial interest in Phones4u. He has also paid an undisclosed sum to take a 51% shareholding in Caudwell Marine, which has developed a new propulsion system for the recreational boating market.
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9.Baroness Howard de Walden & Family
£1,400m
Howard de Walden Estates
2009: £1,070m (+£330m)
Marylebone landlord Howard de Walden Estates jumped at the opportunity to buy in more Harley Street property earlier this year. It paid the Crown Estate £34m for a block of 14 period buildings that had not been traded in more than 470 years.
In 2008-09, Howard de Walden Estates made a near £30m profit. More significantly, it showed up-to-date values for its estate for the first time and the net asset figure was £1.248bn.
In the past 15 years, the family has clocked up more than £266m dividends. The family trusts also own Welbeck Land, which saw its profits rise sharply from £187,000 to £15.4m in the same period.
With £32.4m net assets, it is highly active in property development round the country from Guildford to South Wales and Manchester, to name but a few of its developments.
With an uptick in central London values, we reckon the business assets of the family are now worth £1.25bn and we add another £150m for past dividends and other property assets to the Howard de Walden family after tax.
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11 £1,060m
John Whittaker
Peel Holdings
2009: £1,360m (-£300m)
The £600m MediaCity scheme at Salford Quays in Greater Manchester is the latest jewel to be added to John Whittaker’s crown. The Peel Holdings development will become the northern home of the BBC next year.
The business empire amassed by Whittaker, who is famous for developing the Trafford Centre, covers ports, airports, real estate companies and energy – including a 28% stake in UK Coal.
Whittaker, 68, nearly became a Catholic priest but went into the quarrying business before moving into property. In the 1980s, he fought a long and sometimes bitter battle to take over the Manchester Ship Canal Company.
He has not been unscathed by the recent recession. Peel’s airport business, which owns Liverpool John Lennon airport, saw its losses widen from £4.6m to £13m in the year to March 2009, for example. However, the airport business has recently found a strategic partner to help it weather the drop in traffic, selling a 65% stake to Vancouver Airport Services.
Whittaker’s two main companies, Peel Holdings (TCL) and Peel Holdings (Land and Property) showed £1.2bn of assets in 2008-09. Whittaker’s share is worth £660m. His other assets, including personal property and the quoted stakes, should take him to £1.060bn.
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12 Viscount Portman & Family
£1,000m
Portman Estates
2009: £950m (+£50m)
Viscount Portman’s Burtley Estate consists of 2,000 acres of farmland and woodland in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Home to an organic herd of 200 pedigree South Devon cattle, it is Portman’s latest venture, complementing his 3,000 acre Herefordshire estate. Early customers for the beef include Waitrose and the Hyatt Churchill Hotel. Portman’s principal property holding – 110 acres of prime London estate – is undergoing a huge upgrade.
Gareth Clutton, who took the helm of the property company two years ago, has been finding plenty to get his teeth into. The estate has been busy forming a joint venture to bring forward a mixed-use redevelopment of Marble Arch House, which sits at the gateway to the Portman Village shopping streets.
As well as the London estate, Portman, 52, owns a clutch of rather obscure assets, including 17,000 acres at Wagga Wagga, in New South Wales, Australia. Other assets include a share in commercial properties in Manhattan and Palm Beach in Florida. There are few signs of family wealth in two companies, called Brickleton Group and Portman Settled Estates, with £500,000 net assets between them.
With the improvements on the estate and the central London property market showing signs of revival, we raise the estate valuation to £950m in the current climate. We add another £50m for family assets including the Herefordshire estate and a holiday home in Antigua.
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13.Bernard Lewis & Family
£920m
Lewis Trust Group
2009: £920m (No change)
The Lewis Trust group saw its profits fall sharply in 2009 from £108m to £60.5m though sales rose from £966m to £1.02bn.
The Lewis family, which owns the retailing to property and hotels group, is headed by chairman Bernard Lewis, 84, whose seven decades in retail began when his parents ran a fruit shop and aged ten when he was left in charge of the till.
Years later, after being demobbed from the RAF at the end of the second world war he tried his hand at the greengrocery trade. His first venture in 1946 was a corrugated iron and timber shack on a bomb site on north London’s Holloway Road. He paid £5 a week on a weekly tenancy, with no security of tenure. He was 22 years old.
Next came a knitting wool shop, called The Wool Shop, on another bomb site in Holloway, and soon textiles won out over soft fruits. In 1948, the first clothes shop was open. The numbers grew and the Lewis Separates chain was born.
In the mid-1950s, Lewis started designing his own clothes. By the mid-1960s, with the Kings Road in Chelsea seen as the centre of fashion, the chain was renamed Chelsea Girl. In 1987, the first River Island store was opened and, within four years, all the Chelsea Girls had been rebranded as River Island.
River Island profits fell 15% in 2009, reflecting the highly competitive retail market. The Lewis family and trusts own all the business, which showed nearly £404m net assets in 2009.
We value the company at £420m. Dividends and other property assets should add perhaps £500m after tax.
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14.Gerald Hines
£800m
Hines
2009: £800m (No change)
Celebrated American developer Gerald Hines, 84, knows all about big projects, running one of the largest property operations in the world.
For the past 10 years he has been based in Mayfair and is now active in Britain. Having rejected the opportunity to build the original Canary Wharf, Hines is now completing a £400m office scheme over London’s Cannon Street rail station.
Hines’s start in life was far from silver spoon as the son of a steelworker and a schoolteacher from Gary, Indiana. He grew up in the Depression, and his ambition to make money was present from an early age. His first proper job was selling fans and blowers for office buildings in Houston. But in 1952, Hines started out in property and became one of the world’s best-known property entrepreneurs, bringing fine architecture to the commercial market.
From London, Hines spearheads expansion across Europe and the world. Forbes magazine reckons that Hines has put up more steel and concrete than any other American developer.
The group manages more than 120m sq ft, around half of which is Hines-owned, and half is on behalf of third parties. In 2000, a Forbes analysis suggested that Hines was worth around £1bn, and possibly a lot more.
In the current climate, we keep him at £800m.
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15. Eddie Healey & Family
£750m
Stadium (Holdings)
2009: £750m (No change)
British Land sold a 50% stake in its Meadowhall shopping centre near Sheffield for £587.7m to investment company London & Stamford and an unidentified partner in February 2009.
Meadowhall was valued at £1.4bn in September 2008, so British Land took a sizeable hit with the sale. Even so, that value reflects what a goldmine Eddie Healey and partner Paul Sykes created. The £1.17bn sale of Meadowhall in 1999 netted Eddie, 72, around £420m for his 60% stake (taking account of £470m debt in the sale price).
With some of the Meadowhall proceeds reinvested, we can see around £410m of net assets in the 2008 accounts of four Healey family companies including Stadium Holdings, which is slightly up on last year, although overall the figures are down from £650m net assets in 2007.
But the jewel in Healey’s crown is CentrO, Europe’s largest shopping centre built on 196 acres of an old steelwork site on the Ruhr, Germany. Work started in 1996 and it has been granted permission for an extension.
Some 20m people visit it every year and it is still entirely owned by the Healey family. With its success and scarcity value, it should easily be worth £300m on its own in the current difficult climate.
In all, Eddie Healey should be worth perhaps £750m, allowing for any double counting.
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16. Benzion Freshwater & Family
£732m
Daejan Holdings
2009: £495m (+£237m)
Daejan Holdings is now valued at £376.5m. Chairman and managing director, Benzion Freshwater, 62, and his family have a 79% stake in trusts in the London-based property group. That stake is now worth £325m.
Freshwater’s s father, Osias, arrived in London three days before the second world war as a penniless refugee.
In 1957 he took over Daejan which had been created in 1935 to exploit Dutch East Indies plantations. When he died in 1976, he was London’s biggest private landlord with 20,000 tenants.
Benzion Freshwater has 292 directorships in a complex web of companies. Aside from the stake in Daejan, we can see three other main companies, Highdorn, Metropolitan Properties and Centremanor, which had £720m net assets between them in 2008-09, but allowing for double counting on our part and any charitable stakes cuts the net assets attributable to the Freshwaters to perhaps £370m.
We have ignored a host of minor companies to allow a safety margin on these figures. To the £695m business wealth, we add £37m for past dividends to the Freshwater family, taking it to £732m.
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17. Lord Sugar
£730m
Amshold Group
2009: £730m (No change)
BBC’s Apprentice TV show host Lord Sugar saw profits at his Amshold Group slashed in 2008-09 from £78.9m to £4.7m. The value of its net assets also fell from £272m to £203m.
Amshold, which holds Sugar’s property interests, said that it had “long-term faith in the property market”. Showing his confidence Sugar, 62, recently put two of his Mayfair properties on the market with a £130m price tag, reflecting a return to 2006 prices.
Sugar, knighted in 2000 for services to business, was created a life peer by Gordon Brown in 2009. A Hackney tailor’s son, Sugar made headlines with his Amstrad operation, started in 1968, which became a leading consumer electronics group in the 1980s and 1990s. But following the £125m sale of Amstrad in July 2007, his business activity is largely concentrated on property. Sugar should have received around £36m for his Amstrad stake. He has at least £400m worth of property held either via Amshold or overseas.
Sugar certainly has not lost his eye for a bargain , snapping up a £35m Spanish hotel in 2009 for just £2.5m. But Mayfair is where Amshold has been a hefty investor in property. In addition he has £150m of cash, and personal assets including property in London, Florida and Spain. We value Sugar at £730m.
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18. Prince Charles
£680m
Duchy of Cornwall
2009: £520m (+£160m)
The heir to the throne’s intervention in plans to build a modernist scheme on the prime Chelsea Barracks site was described as “unwelcome” by a high court judge earlier this year.
But Prince Charles, 62, has never been shy about his preference for more traditional architecture. His own taste is on view at Poundbury, outside Dorchester, which was built on Duchy of Cornwall land and tested his ideas about architecture, the environment and town planning.
The Duchy, created by royal charter in 1337 by Edward III, delivers its annual income to Price Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall but he cannot profit from the sale of capital assets. In 2009-10, it produced a surplus of £14.7m.
The Duchy also saw a sharp rise in its 2009-10 net assets to nearly £664m after the dip in 2008-09. Its prime properties performed particularly well and the overall value of its commercial portfolio rose 9% to £141m.
We value the Duchy on its net asset figure, and Prince Charles in his capacity as steward at £680m with personal wealth added, even though he cannot personally benefit from realising any assets.
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19. Peter Jones & Family
£673m
Emerson Developments (Holdings)
2009: £556m (+£117m)
Emerson Developments, the Alderley Edge-based company was started by Jones, a former joiner, who moved into housebuilding in Cheshire way back in 1959.
He was one of the first developers to spot the development potential of south Manchester, buying up tracts of land cheaply. He never looked back and has taken his development work overseas to Portugal and Florida. But Emerson was not immune and in 2008-09 went from a £34.7m profit to a £6.1m loss, mainly due to exceptional losses on foreign exchange borrowings of over £24m. Group turnover fell from £180m to £130m and net assets from £694m to £605m.
Jones, 75, has another company, PE Jones (Properties), with around £50m of net assets in 2008-09. Jones and family trusts own all the shares in both. With economic recovery starting, we value the businesses on their £657m net assets, and add £16m for other assets and property.
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20. Jon Hunt
£660m
ex-Foxtons
2009: £660m (No change)
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Jon Hunt has invested more than £150m in distressed commercial, residential and agricultural opportunities (the assets at his Suffolk Estate now include over 4,000 acres of prime arable land ) which he hopes will show significant growth in the future.
Hunt, 57, is an expert at timing, having sold the London-based Foxtons estate agency at the height of the boom in early 2007 for £375m. Foxtons has had a torrid time in the property downturn but Hunt showed no inclination to buy it back even for a fraction of the original sale price.
Last year, he bought properties for his serviced office business Ocubis. In May 2009 he spent £16m on a Kensington High Street building, following that with a £20m Victoria Street building.
Hunt has clearly come a long way since his days at Millfield, the private school in Somerset to which he won a sports scholarship for tennis and rugby. He left after O-levels and tried his hand in the army, but didn’t see it as a long-term career.
He had a stint of part-time employment, including one job as a car washer in California, but his talent for business came through when he joined an independent estate agency in Woking, Surrey.
He worked there for eight years before striking out on his own in property. A formidable estate agent, Hunt also took Foxtons into America but the business folded as the American housing market collapsed.
Hunt has also been built up his own residential and commercial property portfolio. including his London home and Suffolk estate. With personal assets added, these are worth £335m. Adding in his Foxtons proceeds, Hunt is now worth around £660m.
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21. Peter Green
£650m
Luscar
2009: £500m (+£150m)
Peter Green will have been pleased with the sale in June of the Knightsbridge Estate for £580m, a yield of around 4%, to Saudi Arabian investor Olayan Group. Green, 75, was part of a consortium led by Derek Quinlan which bought the trophy asset for £532m in 2005.
In July 2009 Savills valued the estate at £480m, putting pressure on the loan, so the price achieved this year will have come as a relief. Green had a 20% stake through a Cypriot company, Misland.
Green’s father was a Manchester draper who later developed a chain of grocery shops which were sold in 1965 to Tesco. But Green’s life was to change completely in 1975 when he went on a cultural trip to China. There he met Mary-Jean Mitchell, daughter of Sir Harold Mitchell, reckoned then to be one of the top 20 richest Britons.
Mitchell had left Scotland for Bermuda in 1947 disgusted with the way his mining and railway assets had been nationalised by the Labour government.
He concentrated on the family’s separate mining interests in Canada and established homes or vast ranches round the globe in Jamaica, Brazil, Canada, Portugal, Guatemala, Honduras and Switzerland.
Green settled with his bride in Bermuda, at the £10m family mansion, while her father groomed her to take over the business. Green was effectively shut out at that period.
But Sir Harold died in 1983, and then tragically, Mary-Jean was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988 and died two years later at 38. Green was effectively left in charge of the family business with their two sons.
In 1996, much of the family’s Canadian huge mining operations, held via Luscar Ltd, were sold in a £300m deal. The Green family invested around 10% of their proceeds in a new Luscar, which itself was taken over in 2001 in a £600m deal, netting the Green family perhaps £50m. In addition in 1996, the Green family also made a £60m profit from selling its stake in a small energy company.
Green moved the management of his substantial business affairs from Bermuda to Dublin in 2000. Family properties in Bermuda and London, plus assets in Canada and the profits from his recent London deals put Green at £650m.
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21. Paul Sykes
£650m
Highstone Group
2009: £550m (+£100m)
Paul Sykes has left property development behind. The 67-year-old Yorkshire-based entrepreneur is now busy investing in forestry.
His Highstone Foundation charity is supporting rainforest conservation and the preservation of wildlife habitats. He has also moved into forestry investment in New Zealand.
Sykes, who left his Barnsley school at 15, started making his fortune by breaking up old buses and selling parts to the Far East. Later, he moved into property and, working with Eddie Healey, turned 1,500 derelict acres next to the M1 into the Meadowhall Centre. They sold Meadowhall in 1999 for £1.2bn.
In 2009 there were £260m net assets in Sykes’ Highstone Group and we reckon he should be worth around £650m. He spent £6m on a high profile campaign to preserve the pound and against loss of sovereignty to Europe. So disillusioned is Sykes with the state of Britain that he may even follow his forestry investments to live in New Zealand.
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23. Richard Caring
£600m
International Clothing Designs (Holdings)/Caprice Holdings
2009: £450m (+£150m)
The notoriously driven Richard Caring has had another busy year. At Wentworth, the Surrey golf club he bought for £130m in 2005, he has completed a nine-month, £6.5m redesign.
There has been a stream of new restaurant openings, and many more are on the cards: last spring, Caring gazumped Wolsey owners Chris Corbin and Jeremy King to sign for a new restaurant on Capital & Counties’ Covent Garden estate.
The globe-trotting Caring also opened a Los Angeles version of private members club Soho House, in which he owns an 80% stake, and has branched into hotels with a project in Shanghai.
Future projects will include the redevelopment of the former US Navy offices on Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, which Caring bagged as part of a consortium for £250m in 2007.
He told a newspaper earlier this year: “I think I suffer from insecurity. I have to continually prove something to myself all the time.”
Caring has surely done that time and again. His portfolio of restaurants defied the credit crunch by sharply increasing profits in the year to June 2009.
Caprice Holdings, which runs London favourites The Ivy, J Sheekey and Le Caprice in the West End, Daphne’s in South Kensington and Scott’s in Mayfair, made a profit of £8.4m on £39.4m sales.
A fashion tycoon originally, Caring, 62, owns International Clothing Designs (Holdings), which once dominated the supply of fashion garments from the Far East to UK retailers.
Retailers now increasingly deal with suppliers direct, so the business is smaller than it was.
In 2008-09, profits at the company fell to £227,000 on £65.2m sales. But this is but a fraction of the total, and the nearest figure Caring admits to is “nine figures”. He inherited the business from his father and built it up after spending many years in the Far East himself.
Caring also made a fortune in property deals in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s.
He does sell, occasionally. Previously, he’d bought the Belgo, Bierodrome and Strada restaurant chains for £57m in September 2005.
Two years later he sold them for £140m.
Clearly, money is no object then to Caring. Indeed, with his trophy assets, his £15m North London home and proceeds from the sale of his stake in fashion designer, Amanda Wakeley, and remaining stakes in other businesses such as the upmarket Whistles and a £10m stake in the quoted Carluccios restaurant chain – currently the subject of a City takeover bid – Caring is hugely asset rich.
We raise him to £600m this year.
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23. The Jatania Family
£600m
Lornamead
2009: £380m (+£220m)
Lornamead, the personal care operation, had a tough time in the American market in 2008-09. But the business had a record 2009-10, making around £50m profit on its world-wide operations.
Lornamead is run and co-owned by four brothers, led by chief executive Mike, 45, with George, 60, Vin, 55, and Danny, 51.
The family, originally from India, came to Britain in 1969 by way of Uganda.
Lornamead buys unwanted toiletry or beauty care brands from multinationals and, in 2005, snapped up the famous Yardley brand for a reported £60m.
Last year, it sold off part of Yardley for nearly £30m.
With a large property portfolio in the Paddington and Elephant & Castle areas of London, the Jatanias should easily be worth £600m.
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25. Sir Anwar Pervez & Family
£580m
Bestway (Holdings)/Palmbest
2009: £500m (+£80m)
Profits at West London-based Bestway rose in 2008-09 to £80.6m on sales of £2.05bn.
It is a triumph for Sir Anwar Pervez, Bestway’s founder.
Pervez, 75, a farmer’s son from Rawalpindi, built Bestway into a chain of 11 shops and then in 1976 he turned to cash and carry with his first depot in West London.
It was tough going at first but he turned it into a business empire with interests in banking in Pakistan, as well as a major cement business there, plus property, rice milling and cash and carry wholesaling in the UK.
With the £100m acquisition of Batleys, the UK’s oldest cash and carry operation in early 2005, Bestway now has over 50 depots round the country.
In the current climate, we value parent company Bestway (Holdings) at around £750m while Pervez, his family and trusts have a £360m stake.
A separate property operation, Palmbest and other assets should add another £220m.
Pervez would be much richer if he did not give large amounts to charity every year.
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25. Sir Donald Gordon & Family
£580m
Capital Shopping Centres/Capital & Counties
2009: £465m (+£115m)
The demerger of quoted property group Liberty International into two separate groups leaves Sir Donald Gordon and his family with big stakes in the two new companies, Capital & Counties Properties and Capital Shopping Centres.
Gordon, 80, started a South African life insurance operation in the 1950s, finally selling out of the South African group in 1999.
He also focused on British property through Liberty International. His family stakes in the two new Capital operations are worth over £450m. South African share sales and other assets add around £150m.
“I’m hoping that I can now switch the focus I’ve put on business into opera. I want it to be the focus of my life,” says Gordon of his retirement.
If that is the case, then opera in this country should be set for a golden age.
He recently promised £10m to the Royal Opera House and a further £10m to the Wales Millennium Centre.
As a result, we cut the Gordon family wealth back by that £20m to £580m.
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27. John Magnier
£540m
Coolmore/Sloane Capital
2009: £560m (-£20m)
Irish racing tycoon John Magnier has had a rough time of it lately. The Coolmore Stud cash cow that he has relied on for so long hit the buffers when Ireland went into economic meltdown.
There have been redundancies at the global operation and, more significantly, prices charged for the services of his stallions crashed in Ireland and the US, which must have had a detrimental effect on Magnier’s fortune. His horses on the track have been disappointing this year, too.
But Magnier, 62, and his business partner JP McManus have been quietly building a stake in the troubled pub group Mitchells & Butlers.
The duo have been steadily buying shares through their Elpida vehicle since late 2007 and more recently doubled their stake to 17.6%. With the company worth £1.23bn, that stake is now worth £220m.
Pubs are just the latest investment area for the low-key Magnier. With McManus, Magnier is perhaps best known to the British public for the £227m stake they held in premiership football club Manchester United until May 2005.
When they sold to new United owner, Malcolm Glazier, the pair made a hefty £90m profit on their original investment.
Magnier was also part of a consortium that bought the radio assets of Chrysalis Group for £170m, and he also made a tidy £23m from the sale of a 13% stake in Devro, the Scottish sausage skin maker.
With McManus and fellow Irish tycoon Dermot Desmond he has a stake in Barchester, a profitable nursing home operation (revalued at £1bn in 2006) the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados and Global media. These stakes are worth £339m after borrowings.
He shared in a £40m windfall in February 2006, selling an option on a London office site. With McManus and Desmond, he also sold the Next Generation fitness chain for around £132m.
He and MacManus plus another partner, Aidan Brooks, have a large property portfolio held in Sloane Capital. Magnier also has homes in Spain, Ireland, Barbados and Switzerland where he lives for tax purposes.
But he is not immune to the downturn and, in all, his assets add up to around £540m.
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28. Jim Mellon
£530m
Regent Pacific Corporate Finance
2009: £500m (+£30m)
Millionaire investor Jim Mellon is investing heavily in German property and around 70% of his wealth is tied up in some 40,000 apartments there.
Mellon, who started out as a fund manager in Hong Kong in the late 1970s, made his money from a range of investments including a £55m return on a firm called Charlemagne Capital in 2006. He has also invested heavily in solar power and says it will be “bigger than the internet within five years.”
He has stakes of around £20m in a number of quoted companies, including one called Emerging Markets, which invests in metals used in solar power technology.
Mellon, 53, is based in the Isle of Man, where he is one of the biggest property owners and, with 450 staff, one of the largest employers on the island. He has two homes there, four other homes round Europe and several properties in Ibiza.
With annual earnings of between $5m and $10m, he can afford his own private jet, which cost $8m. More recently, he has made substantial profits selling the euro against the dollar and recently went short again on the banks.
His Hong Kong- listed company Regent Pacific is cash rich with its main investments in China and commodities, particularly uranium. Mellon is now easily worth £530m.
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29. Chris Lazari
£522m
Lazari Investments
2009: £425m (+£97m)
Chris Lazari, the Greek Cypriot-born property mogul, will shortly have a major new tenant within his London-based portfolio. Global agent CB Richard Ellis will move into Lazari’s 100,000 sq ft Henrietta House, W1, following a recent refurbishment.
CBRE will be replacing outgoing tenant Diageo, the drinks firm.
The deal is characteristic of Lazari’s skill in upgrading buildings and getting good tenants across its base in the diverse West End.
Lazari’s portfolio was valued at £1.33bn in accounts to March 2010.
As a result, profits at Lazari Investments rose in 2009-10 from £26.7m to £41.4m. This 55% increase was achieved on the back of much lower interest rates and a focus on cutting the group’s borrowings sharply by £53m over the year.
Lazari’s 130 buildings are also filled with 424 blue-chip tenants drawn from the top ranks of British business.
With little new build in the West End, Lazari can look forward to healthy rent rises in the future as demand outstrips supply for Grade A space.
In late 2007, Lazari grew the business with the acquisition of Greater London House in Camden for £165m and the Met building in Percy Street, W1, for £107m.
Lazari, 64, came to Britain in the early 1970s to work in the fashion business. However, in 1978, he diversified into the property field and has never looked back.
Cautiously though, in the current climate for property, we value the Lazari real estate interests on the net assets, which hit £452.3m in early 2010.
And we add another £70m to his portfolio for personal property and cash in the bank, taking Lazari to £522m.
30 £510m
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30. Freddie Linnett & The Murphy Family
Charles Street Buildings (Leicester)
2009: £445m (+£65m)
Profits at Charles Street Buildings (Leicester) fell from £35.2m to £33.6m in the year to November 2009.
Despite the severe downturn, net assets at the family-owned property group rose £27m to nearly £476m.
The company spent £15.5m acquiring properties in the year. Freddie Linnett, 60, is a director and leading shareholder in the business, which was started by her uncles who came to Britain from Ireland after the second world war. When the uncles died, Linnett inherited their stakes. She married a top accountant in 1995.
We value the business on the net assets figure. Other assets and nearly £88m of dividends from 1995 to 2009 take Linnett and the Leicester-based Murphy family to £510m after tax.
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31. Trevor Hemmings
£500m
Northern Trust Group
2009: £300m (+£200m)
Trevor Hemmings’ Leisure Parcs group sold the famous Blackpool Tower to the local council for around £40m earlier this year.
The council hopes to revive the seaside resort. Hemmings has been buying too, adding a 175,000 sq ft former BP/ Castrol facility to his portfolio. Northern Trust intends to let the commercial buildings and review regeneration options for the rest of the site.
Hemmings, 75, started out as a brickie’s apprentice locally in Leyland. Later, he built his own housebuilding firm and sold it for £1.5m in the early 1970s to the late Sir Fred Pontin.
Hemmings became his right hand man in the Pontins leisure operation. He later took over the business and sold it in 1989 for a hefty profit.
In 2000, Hemmings bought Littlewoods’ pools operation from the Moores family for £161m. His main holding company, the Northern Trust Group, had £130m net assets in 2009.
In all, Hemmings is now easily worth £500m.
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31. Leo Noé & Family
£500m
F&C Reit Asset Management
2009: £530m (-£30m)
F&C Reit Asset Management managed to hold on to the lucrative management contract for the F&C Commercial Property Trust this year, and elsewhere the business is thriving.
On chairman Leo Noé’s watch, it launched its first open-ended property fund for private and institutional investors in July. And the separate Devonshire UK Opportunities Fund, launched in May 2009 to take advantage of the downturn, is expected to start investing before Christmas after reaching its first close.
Noé, one of the more low key property men in Britain, is known for his shrewd reading of the market. His expertise was highlighted in July 2008 when his company, REIT, merged with F&C Asset Management.
Noé and business partner Ivor Smith collected £60m in cash and loan notes in the deal, which created a business with £8.5bn of real estate under management from the UK to Israel to India.
But the downturn has caused some problems for Noé – St Katharine Docks, a major development opportunity owned jointly with AREA Property Partners, breached its loan-to-value banking covenant this year and negotiations are ongoing with debt servicer Capita.
We can see around £64m of net assets in a number of companies owned by the Noé family such as Agra and Landmaster Properties, and the extent of their deals and investments indicate more substantial wealth.
Early in 2006, for example, Noé sold its Fosse Retail Park for £360m, just a year after buying it for £307m. In 2004, three shopping centres in the north, bought in 2002-03 for £294m, were sold for £378.5m. Noé has a 55.8% stake in British-Israel Investments, a mall owner, which is in £300m takeover talks. In all, we value Noé, 57, at £500m.
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31. Jack Petchey
£500m
Trefick
2009: £450m (+£50m)
Jack Petchey reckons the recent recession was the worst he has seen in his 85 years.
A canny East End investor and property man, he has taken hits on several high profile investments such as car dealer Pendragon, office provider Workspace, and property companies Warner Estates and Rugby Estates. At Rugby he took a 25% hit on selling his stake.
But Petchey has plenty to play to make up for such losses. Last year, he said that he was considering an £80m sale of his leisure business to raise cash to reinvest in property while values were low. However, a string of individual sales now seems more likely.
In 2006 and 2007, Petchey sold around £225m of stakes in six companies including a pub chain, Aston Villa football club and Reg Vardy, the car dealer.
Petchey has no formal education to pull off his deals. He first earned money running errands before working after the war as a taxi driver. Using his £39 army gratuity, he built a fleet of taxis. He later expanded into used cars, property and timeshare.
He once bought Watford football club from Sir Elton John, but long ago sold that stake. Based in Chigwell, Petchey commutes to his office in Ilford daily. He plans to give the bulk of his fortune to charity through the Jack Petchey Foundation, which has given away £65m to supporting youth projects in London and the Home Counties.
Petchey has also helped more than 40 schools achieve specialist school status, earning himself an OBE.
It will be a sizeable fortune he gives away. He was the sole shareholder in two Isle of Man companies which were sold to the quoted Saville Gordon property group in 1998. Petchey received £72m in cash and £15m in shares for his stakes.
Today, we can see more than £37m of stakes he still holds in quoted companies. With earlier proceeds and past profits, his quoted investments have yielded around £400m of wealth.
Timeshare and property interests take Petchey to £500m in the current improving climate.
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34. The Duke of Bedford
£490m
Woburn Abbey
2009: £490m (No change)
Though we can see just £11m net assets in the 2009 accounts of three family companies, including Woburn Enterprises, the Duke of Bedford surprised the property community in April 2009 by purchasing the suitably scruffy offices of Time Out magazine in Tottenham Court Road from Land Securities for £14.1m.
The 340-year-old Bedford Estate in London owns around 180 buildings in Bloomsbury, centred on the square of the same name. But this is the first deal to make a splash for years. For the Bedford Estate is probably the quietest and most conservative of the inherited London Estates.
In 2004, the Duke said he was “very bullish” about Bloomsbury and said £50m had been reserved to buy some modern office blocks to the west of Bedford Square, but he has waited for prices to fall before moving into action.
Recently, he joined a group of wealthy investors who have put nearly £20m into buying up New Zealand property. Nearer home though, the new £200m Center Parcs holiday village on his Woburn estate is under construction.
It will create 1,500 jobs in rural Bedfordshire. Planning permission was granted after a public inquiry, overruling a local authority decision.
Bedford is also trying to spruce up Bloomsbury with better quality retailers. He is at least trying to continue the entrepreneurial activities of his grandfather and father. He inherited the title and estate from his father, the 14th duke, who died in 2003.
Harrow and Harvard-educated Bedford, 48, is well versed in the management of the extraordinary 13,000 Woburn Abbey estate and house. He has various and 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 £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.
Although we can see just £12m net assets in three 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 or the like 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. Estates Gazette put a £200m price tag on these at the top of the market.
Allowing for any inheritance tax following his father’s death, we stick with a £490m valuation for Bedford.
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34. JP McManus
£490m
Sloane Capital
2009: £430m (+£60m)
A former bookie, JP McManus and his business partner, Irish racing tycoon John Magnier, have been quietly building a stake in the troubled pub group Mitchells & Butlers. The duo have been steadily buying shares through their Elpida vehicle since late 2007 and now have a stake worth £220m.
McManus, based in Geneva, is also one of the top racehorse owners in Ireland, with more than 100 horses in training and a stud in Co Kildare. The recent marriage of his daughter cost McManus around £5.5m. But he can easily afford the outlay. He is reckoned to have made £250m over the years from playing the foreign exchange markets.
With Magnier, he had a £227m stake in premiership football club Manchester United, until they sold out to United owner Malcolm Glazer in May 2005, netting a £90m profit.
He shared a £125m dividend from the Barchester Healthcare group in 2006 and also shared the £132m proceeds from the sale of a fitness chain.
McManus was active in the property boom through Sloane Capital, in partnership with Magnier and Aidan Brooks, the Limerick property developer. Sloane bought a prestige Paris office and retail site in July 2007 for £439m. It was part of a world-wide expansion drive by Sloane which saw it buy a Bloomingdale’s store in New York for £35m and two streets of luxury shops in Los Angeles for £150m. Sloane also has a castle in Dublin, Unilever House in London and the Hilton Hotel at Canary Wharf. It remains particularly valuable.
With a share of the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados and an adjacent £21m villa, McManus, 59, is easily worth £490m.
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36. Ronald Hobson
£470m
Consolidated Property Investments
2009: £470m (No change)
Ronald Hobson originally teamed up with Sir Donald Gosling after the second world 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, collecting around £290m each. In 2004-05, they divested themselves of further firms, Consolidated Property Investments and later Metrose Property, for £189m. Hobson, 89, should have made around £97m from those two deals.
He still has stakes in some small property companies with Gosling as a partner. We can see £2m net assets there. But huge dividends from National Parking before its sale, plus the recent property company sales, keep Hobson at £470m this year.
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37. Sir Donald Gosling
£450m
Hildane Properties
2009: £450m (No change)
As an honorary commodore in the Royal Naval Reserve, Sir Donald Gosling will have been delighted and honoured in early 2009 to have been promoted to the rank of honorary rear admiral on his 80th birthday.
The navy and the sea are consuming passions for Gosling. He is president of naval charity, the White Ensign Association. His yacht, the 245-ft Leander, was named after HMS Leander in which Gosling served as a signalman after the war.
Gosling, of course, is one half of the duo that made a fortune from car parks. With partner Ronald Hobson, he started the National Parking Corporation in 1948 as post-war Britain started to recover. They built it up until 1998 when they sold the business, netting around £290m each at the time.
Gosling 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.
So affording Leander is no problem for Gosling, who still has a £1m stake in a small property company called Hildane Properties. In all, with £92m net assets and after hefty charitable donations to the Gosling Foundation, he should be worth at least £450m.
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37. Terry Bramall & Family
£450m
Keepmoat
2009: £400m (+£50m)
Terry Bramall has not given up on business despite selling his Keepmoat operation at the top of the market in 2007.
Bramall is now financing developer 4Urban. Formed in 2007, the company’s aim is to form strategic partnerships with financiers and the public sector.
Projects taken on so far include a £5m retail redevelopment, 5Rise, in Bingley, and a retail and office complex in Harrogate.
Bramall, 68, made his money with Doncaster-based Keepmoat, which dates back to 1931, when it was established by Bramall’s late father and a partner.
In 1968, after a stint with Taylor Woodrow, Bramall joined what was still a modest operation.
The business started to move forward in the 1970s when local authorities started to refurbish their housing stock.
A lot of other building companies were not interested, seeing the work as dirty and complicated, but Bramall realised that refurbishment was much more profitable than new-build, and Keepmoat began to carve out a niche reputation.
Bramall’s work was recognised when he was awarded the title Master Entrepreneur in 2004.
His family had a 72% stake with trusts in the company which was sold to the management in a £783m deal backed by the Bank of Scotland in August 2007.
However, allowing for tax on the sale proceeds and any debt built into sale prices, we cut that back to £430m.
As one of the owners of Doncaster Rovers, Bramall has also helped underwrite the Championship team. Other assets and past dividends take him to around £450m.
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37. Jack Dellal
£450m
Allied Commercial Holdings
2009: £450m (No change)
“Black Jack” Dellal keeps a very low profile now, aside from occasional forays into the property market.
In July 2007, Dellal showed his mettle when his consortium sold Shell-Mex House in London for £490m, just a month before the credit crunch and property crash.
It had been bought for £327.5m in 2002.
A dealmaker whose prowess is only matched by his astonishing virility, Dellal became a father again for the ninth time in his late 1970s.
He made his mark in the early 1970s, selling his Dalton Barton bank for £58m. Later, he went on to become a major property player.
His most famous coup was to make £75m in a six-month period in 1987 by buying and quickly selling on Bush House in central London.
Dellal’s main company, Allied Commercial Holdings, saw its losses fall in 2008-09 from £3.6m to £2.1m on £3.4m sales, while its net assets also fell slightly to £54.6m.
With asset prices continuing to recover this year, we keep 87-year-old Dellal at £450m in the current uncertain economic climate.
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40. Tony Gallagher
£425m
Gallagher UK
2009: £500m (-£75m)
Midlands developer Tony Gallagher capitalised on renewed investor demand earlier this year, selling several retail parks off market over a three-month period for a combined value of more than £150m.
With these deals in the bag, Gallagher, 59, pulled the £118m, 6% yield, sale of a retail park near Walsall in the West Midlands to JP Morgan Asset Management in April. Instead, it will complete a redevelopment project at the Junction 9 park to provide 65,000 sq ft of space, which has been let to Next, Mamas & Papas, Boots and TK Maxx.
Gallagher’s vast spread of activity includes extensive residential developments such as a sustainable new town in Bedfordshire called The Wixams. He has a substantial investment programme in Europe and has acquired in excess of three million sq ft of retail space in Germany.
The recession has inevitably slowed things down, but this diversity has helped Gallagher come through in good shape.
We can see £288m of net assets in the 2008 and 2008-09 accounts of five of Gallagher’s main companies, Countywide Developments, GW305, Gallagher UK, Wixams First and Ashflame.
Gallagher also has various other interests in a substantial finance/consultancy business and the financial markets. We still value him conservatively at £425m.
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41. Clarke Family
£400m
C Le Masurier
2009: £400m (No change)
The Clarke family, now the largest private landowners on the island of Jersey, have large tracts of St Helier, retail outlets and pub sites across the island. Their business – C Le Masurier – is celebrating its 175th birthday this year.
It also owns property in the UK, Luxembourg, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
The death in 2001 of patriarch Fred Clarke led to a major refocusing of this secretive family business with the aim of raising asset values.
But for now, we keep the family at a conservative £400m.
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41. Michael Evans & Family
£400m
Evans Property
2009: £350m (+£50m)
Evans Property Group paid £21.3m for a prime slice of real estate in Leeds city centre in June 2009.
The purchase of 1 Park Row defied the recession and showed that Evans had the support of its bankers at Barclays who provided £13.5m to help fund the purchase. Indeed, right in the depths of the economic crisis, Barclays jointly arranged a £175m loan facility for Evans to “further enhance its purchasing power and enable it to build on its successful track record”.
The low-key Evans family, led by Monaco-based Michael Evans, 74, is heavily involved in development work all over the north of England. The late father of Michael Evans, 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.
Recently, the firm has been reorganising its structure and no accounts have yet been filed for the new Evans Property holding company. It is owned by companies with the name Brightsea followed by initials (for example, Brightsea EP Ltd, Brightsea FP Ltd). Between them they had a huge £2.2bn net assets in 2008-9. We assume there may be some duplication of assets here and value the Evans business at the £350m net asset figure that Barclays attributes to the group.
We add £50m for other assets and past dividends.
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41. Roy Richardson & Family
£400m
Swiftfire
2009: £350m (+£50m)
The death of Don Richardson in September 2007 robbed the Midlands of one of its greatest developers.
With twin brother Roy, 80, Don Richardson had made a name for building shopping centres, most notably Merry Hill in the Black Country.
But shopping centres from afar as Rome or Salzburg by way of Broadstairs, Liverpool and Nuneaton have been on the Richardsons’ menu in recent times.
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, they moved into transport and property.
The brothers sold Merry Hill in 1992 for a £50m profit. Since then, they have been involved in scores of flagship projects in the Midlands.
The family has also taken a 50% stake in a £600m new town project which will resurrect the site of Scotland’s iconic Ravenscraig steelworks.
Another Scottish development, in association with construction group Carillion, is a retail park on the site of the former truck plant in Bathgate.
The Richardsons’ main company, Swiftfire, went from a £2.3m profit to a £1m loss in 2008 while the net assets fell slightly to £145.2m.
We value the business on the net assets.
There are also £25m of net assets in two more separate Richardson companies we can see, including Clubhouse Investments, the parent of Richardson Capital Property Investment Group.
Yet after the acquisition of the European assets, and taking account of other deals and £54m of salaries in recent years, we reckon the Richardson family, now led by Roy alone, is easily worth a net £400m.
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41. David Sullivan
£400m
Roldvale
2009: £400m (No change)
David Sullivan is desperate to relocate West Ham United to the 2012 Olympic Stadium as part of plans to revive the fortunes of the struggling club now under his chairmanship.
Together with business partner David Gold, Sullivan bought a 50% stake in West Ham at the start of the year in a deal valuing the East London club at £105m.
He just can’t leave football alone. The ink had barely dried on his sale of Birmingham City. Sullivan had 16 years at Birmingham and made around £20m from selling his stake, but he ploughed many millions into the Blues over the years. He will be expected to do the same with his new club even though his other business ventures are having a tough time. Roldvale, his main company, made a £528,000 loss in 2009.
But Sullivan, 61, can’t complain. His dividends and salaries over the past 12 years total £55m. His Sport Newspapers, publisher of the lurid tabloids, was sold in August 2007 for around £50m.
Property is where Sullivan has been active, though, and he has a £300m-plus portfolio. We can see part of it in Sullivan’s separate Conegate Holdings, a property company which saw its net assets rise from £39.5m to £136.8m in 2009.
But it was soft porn, and latterly football, that have brought him to public prominence. He owns the biggest chain of licensed sex shops in Britain, the 90-strong Private Shops empire. Sullivan’s property portfolio and other assets should take him to £400m.
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45. Keith Miller & Family
£385m
Miller Group
2009: £280m (+£105m)
A fairly upbeat trading statement came from Miller Group, the Edinburgh-based builder, at the start of the year. It said it was seeing a gradual improvement in the housebuilding market, but warned that mortgage availability would be crucial to restoring stability.
Its losses had narrowed from £170m in 2008 to £72.4m last year. Transaction volumes for the year were up 35%, and forward sales of £108m represented an increase of 100% year-on-year.
But it has been a difficult journey through the recession for Britain’s biggest privately-owned housebuilder. In 2008, Miller Group had to cut its British workforce from 2,000 to 1,400 as the housing market slumped and its figures became a sea of red ink – compared with a profit of £81m in 2007.
Chief executive Keith Miller, 61, grandson of founder Sir James Miller, took over the helm in 1994 and oversaw the company’s rapid growth before recession hit.
In April 2008, HBOS bought a stake in Miller in a deal which valued it at around £500m. We now value the Miller family stake at perhaps £350m. Past dividends (£43m from 1997-2006) and other assets take the Miller family to £385m after tax.
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46. Kevin & Michael Lagan
£350m
Lagan Holdings
2009: £250m (+£100m)
The Belfast-based Lagan Group is active on the world stage building roads and airport facilities in places such as Jamaica, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, as well as Northern Ireland.
The Lagan brothers, Michael and Kevin, who rank among the top construction tycoons in Ireland, took over the operation established by their father in 1960. They have steadily expanded into construction-related businesses trading within five groups: Lagan Holdings, Lagan Cement, Kingscourt Bricks, Lagan Homes and Lagan Developments.
These are involved in road building, property development and waste management. They also have advanced cement works and prime quarrying and asphalt assets.
We can see around £20m profit on £400m sales in various Lagan companies in 2008-09. They had £203m net assets between them. The valuable quarrying assets were reckoned to have a potential sale price in excess of £200m at the height of the boom.
But on the current figures, we reckon the Lagan assets are worth perhaps £350m.
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46. Anthony Lyons
£350m
St James Capital
2009: £250m (+£100m)
Three recent deals have made Anthony Lyons a lot richer. First, in April, the property entrepreneur sold his home in Hampstead, north London, for £43m to a private Russian investor in the most expensive Hampstead residential property sale ever.
Second, working with Brett Palos (Sir Philip Green’s stepson), Lyons, 43, bought the O2 retail and leisure centre in north London for £92.5m in 2009, selling it a year later for £120m.
Third, in February, Liberty International, the FTSE 100 property company, bought full ownership of the Earls Court and Olympia complexes in west London from Lyons and his partners. It was in July 2007, just a month before the credit crunch struck, that Lyons and his partners sold 50% of Earls Court & Olympia to Liberty in a deal which then valued it at £380m.
Lyons is also active in pubs and restaurants and plans to roll out more in European capitals. He is also director of St James Capital, a property investor with £23m net assets in 2008-09. It has netted around £45m profit from the break-up of The Brewery on Chiswell Street, EC1, which it bought in 2005.
Lyons also owns Anthony Lyons Investments, which made a healthy£2m profit on £6.8m sales in 2008-09. With the recent deals and Earls Court & Olympia sale, we value Lyons at £350m this year.
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46. Caspar MacDonald-Hall
£350m
London & Cambridge Properties
2009: £300m (+£50m)
London & Cambridge Properties, one of Britain’s largest private real estate companies, saw its net assets fall sharply from £579m to around £420m in 2008-09, while profits rose slightly from £36.5m to £38.8m.
Falling property values and the strength of the euro against sterling forced the company to renegotiate loans with three banks. It is a leading developer of industrial estates. Property man Caspar MacDonald-Hall, 59, has a 40% stake in London & Cambridge as well as a number of other property assets.
He also has half of Proudreed, a Southampton property investor, with £130m net assets in 2009, so his stake there should exceed £65m. Then there is a 45.5% stake in Ringmerit, which had over £126m net assets in 2009.
In all then, there are more than £290m net assets attributable to MacDonald-Hall, who is regularly listed by Field magazine as one of the 50 best shots in Britain. With past dividends, and his proceeds from the recent takeover of the AIM Group, he should be worth £350m.
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46. Steve Morgan
£350m
Redrow Group
2009: £350m (No change)
Steve Morgan, 57, is the proud owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers, which is now in its second season in the Premier League.
Morgan paid just £10 to Sir Jack Hayward to take over at Molineux in August 2007, but he promised to invest £30m in the club. Morgan can afford it.
He started out labouring for his father’s small civil engineering company after a move to a new school in Liverpool proved a disaster. He went on to set himself up as a subcontractor and founded housebuilder Redrow in 1974.
Morgan floated the company 20 years later and then sold most of his stake before leaving in 2000. He returned as chairman in March 2009, determined to turn the ship around after the mistakes of the boom years.
Morgan has seen the share price revive in recent months, taking his stake to around £114m.
Morgan sold £240m worth of shares when he floated Redrow in the 90s and afterwards when he left the Redrow board in 2000.
He also had a £100m stake in the De Vere leisure group, which was the subject of a bidding battle in the summer of 2006.
Morgan also recently shared the £75m sale proceeds on a Spanish development. After allowing for reinvestment of his Redrow money, Morgan is worth perhaps £350m after tax.
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46. David Wilson & Family
£350m
Davidsons Developments
2009: £275m (+£75m)
David Wilson just can’t leave the building and property business. His new company, Davidsons Developments, made a £1.5m profit on £30.2m sales in 2008-09. It has nearly £77m net assets and should be worth at least £75m.
Davidsons is being relocated in premises that were once used for his old Wilson Bowden company. Wilson joined his dad’s small Ibstock building business in 1961 after graduating from the Leicester Polytechnic School of Building. Wilson Bowden prospered and was floated on the stock market in 1987. It was always regarded as one of the top quoted housebuilders by City analysts, and in May 2007 Wilson, 68, sold the company to rival Barratt Developments in a £2.2bn deal. It netted £727m for Wilson and his family trusts in a mix of £304m cash and Barratt shares.
His remaining Barratt stake is now worth £19m as the shares have drifted downwards recently. The cash element of the deal, £98m of share sales and dividends over the years at Wilson Bowden, and the £75m for Davidsons, take the Wilson family to £350m after tax. He will rise higher if Davidsons proves as successful as Wilson Bowden.
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46. Stephen Vernon
£350m
Green Property
2009: £280m (+£70m)
Stephen Vernon’s Green Property operation unveiled a new joint venture company in June 2010 with €900m of debt and equity to invest in distressed property assets.
Dublin-based Green has joined forces with the private equity firm TPG Capital to target commercial real estate opportunities in Britain and Ireland.
Green seems to be defying the Irish property crash too – in the year to June 2009 its profits moved up sharply to around £2m and it showed £420m net assets.
Vernon, 60, went to university in London, and his first job after graduating was in the public sector, with the Greater London Council. He then moved to St Quintin, a long-established firm of chartered surveyors. He joined Green in 1993.
Nine years later, Green was taken private via a £700m deal backed financially by Merrill Lynch and HBOS. Vernon set about selling £1bn of assets to pay down debt and give his backers a return on their money.
Merrill Lynch cashed in its chips in 2005 as part of a refinancing of the company. Vernon’s personal stake in the business has increased from 2% to 32%.
“This is my business now,” said Vernon. “I’m very glad we did the buyout. The writing was on the wall for us (as a public company) and I think predators would have emerged.”
Green Property still has a strong portfolio of assets. Consequently, we value Vernon at £350m.
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52. Nicholas and Christian Candy
£330m
Candy & Candy
2009: £330m (No change)
The Candy brothers – Nick, 37, and Christian, 36 – are developing the spectacular One Hyde Park residential scheme of 86 flats near Harrods. The Qatari Royal family are investors in the development.
A lavish show flat was unveiled in April after the Candys and their Qatari partners put sales on hold for a year due to the global downturn.
Earlier this year, the legal dispute between Christian Candy’s CPC Group and Qatari Diar over the withdrawal of plans for Chelsea Barracks was discontinued after a confidential settlement.
We stick with last year’s £330m valuation for the developer and interior design duo until the sales of more luxury homes at One Hyde Park are completed.
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52. Mark Dixon
£330m
Regus
2009: £382m (-£52m)
Regus, the world’s largest serviced office operator, recently signed an agreement to provide GE’s workforce with space across its portfolio. This was positive news in what has been a tough market for the firm founded by Mark Dixon.
Despite what he has described as the “fragile” nature of the UK recovery, Regus has accelerated its expansion plans as the recession powers a shift towards flexible working. It is also expanding overseas and now has more than 1,000 centres in 450 cities.
Dixon, 51, stresses that Regus is no longer just a serviced office company. It also operates meeting rooms and video conferencing suites, and offers business support to people who work from home. His stake is now worth £240m.
A former sandwich and later hamburger salesman, Dixon formed Regus in 1989. It floated on the stock market in 2000. The shares soared initially, making Dixon a billionaire on paper. But his wealth collapsed six years ago when the shares went into freefall after hasty over-expansion.
Dixon nursed the business back to health. With other assets and the proceeds of a £61m share sale before the flotation and another £35m last year, he is doing fine.
But in this uncertain climate, we value him at £330m after tax.
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54. Laurence Kirschel
£325m
Consolidated Developments
2009: £300m (+£25m)
Before the recession, Laurence Kirschel’s Consolidated Developments drew up plans for a scheme in London’s Soho which would comprise a 35-room hotel, a 6,000 sq ft restaurant, three shops, a roof-top bar and seven flats. His portfolio in Soho and around Holborn also includes Tin Pan Alley, one of the last undeveloped sites in central London.
Kirschel, 47, hopes to transform Tin Pan Alley into a new cultural quarter for London and spent £14.5m buying a building next to Centre Point to turn into an innovative music centre.
We can see £204m net assets in Consolidated Developments’ 2008-09 accounts and other operations. But these asset values do not take account of Kirschel’s substantial holdings in Soho. We mark him down to £325m in the current climate.
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55. Bob Edmiston
£320m
IM Properties
2009: £300m (+£20m)
Bob Edmiston’s IM Properties is determined to make the most of its cash-rich position in the current market.
The company plans to pursue new development opportunities through direct land acquisition, joint ventures, and sale-and-leasebacks. IM’s existing portfolio includes the 400-acre Birch Coppice Business Park where a planning application has recently been submitted for 2m sq ft of distribution space.
Over the summer, IM released capital with the sales of a portfolio for £23m and its stake in Wolsey Place in Woking, Surrey, for £68m.
An accountant by trade, who once worked for the now defunct Jensen sports car operation, Edmiston has built the IM Group into one of Britain’s biggest importers of Far Eastern cars.
It made a healthy £32.8m profit on £351.6m sales in 2009 and showed net assets of over £391m. We value the company at perhaps £320m. Its IM Properties subsidiary made £23.4m profit on £43.7m sales in 2009. It, too, has a strong asset base, with nearly £254m there.
Since 1998, Edmiston, 64, has had nearly £79m in salaries from IM Group, but has given more than £120m to charity. We value him at £320m this year.
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55. Harry Hyams
£320m
Walton Investments
2009: £300m (+£20m)
Harry Hyams, one of London’s top developers in the 1960s and 1970s, is still involved in business even at the age of 82.
He has stakes in six small property companies with around £17m of net assets. Hyams is also involved in the £200m revamp of Newcastle city centre. This is, of course, small beer for Hyams, the son of an East End bookmaker.
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 art should easily take the low-key Hyams to £320m in the current climate.
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55. Charlotte Townshend
£320m
Addison Developments
2009: £300m (+£20m)
A new investment operation, Cygnet Industries, has been formed by Charlotte Townshend. In 2008-09 it showed nearly £20m net assets.
In July 2008, her Ilchester Estates company bought the Yeoman Industrial Estate in Bournemouth for £13m. The estate will add to Townshend’s already considerable portfolio.
Townshend, 55, has 20 choice acres round London’s exclusive Holland Park, and 15,000 acres in Dorset, where she has her main home.
We can see six farming and estate companies including Cygnet, Addison Developments, and Ilchester Estates, which together showed £39m net assets in 2008-09.
Ilchester Estates carries out other property developments in Britain and also sold a complex of Essex offices and shops for £5.14m in 2005.
With other assets, such as property and choice bloodstock, we raise our valuation of Townshend by the £20m net asset figure of Cygnet to £320m.
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58. Sam Morrison
£296m
Corbo
2009: £250m (+£46m)
Sam Morrison recently sold Newry’s Damolly retail park to newly-formed REIT Metric Property Investments for an initial payment of £28.4m. He also made £48m from selling a Co Antrim retail park.
Morrison, Northern Ireland’s top developer, started by selling leather jackets from the boot of his car, progressing to renting his first retail shop in Ballymena. He expanded to four retail stores within a short space of time.
By 1998 he had moved into property and one of his sons took over as MD of the retail business called SVM Textiles. It now has seven clothing stores across Northern Ireland, with four smaller sites having closed recently, as part of a strategy refocus.
The stores concentrate on high end designer fashion.
Morrison’s property company, Corbo, showed £296.5m net assets in 2008-09. He has a number of other shopping centres, including Fairhill Shopping Centre in Ballymena and a large retail warehouse development outside Newry.
We value Morrison, 58, at around £296m.
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59. Sir Michael Smurfit & Family
£295m
Ballymore
2009: £294m (+£1m)
Sir Michael Smurfit is having to subsidise losses at the K Club, the Ryder Cup golfing venue, of which he owns half. Its value has nose-dived to £25m in the past year. He has built a £7m mansion on the course and others in Spain and Monaco, the tax-haven where he is resident, and has postponed plans to replace his £14m 164ft yacht with a bigger one.
Smurfit, 74, has seen the value of his remaining small stake in his former employer, Smurfit Kappa, rebound to £70m. He received £7.7m when he left the firm in 2007. But it is outside of his former day job that Smurfit claims to have made his most money. He has assets of about £205m. This includes a £40m collection of art, which features works by Louis Le Brocquy and Yeats. He plans to give some of it to the Irish National Gallery and the rest to his six children from two marriages.
Smurfit invests widely in growing Irish private companies including AEP Networks, a Dublin technology firm. He became a director and shareholder in Ballymore International, one of Europe’s largest urban regeneration companies, just as the property bubble burst.
In all, he should be worth £295m.
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60. Sir John & Peter Beckwith
£270m
Pacific Investments & Red River Capital
2009: £330m (-£60m)
Sir John Beckwith has teamed with ex-Lehman banker Gerald Parkes to invest in property across Europe.
Old Harrovian Beckwith and his brother Peter made their first fortune in property, netting around £80m when they sold their London and Edinburgh Trust property group to a Swedish group in 1990 just before the then property crash.
Sir John, 63, moved into new areas of investment and has two main investment vehicles, Pacific Investments and Red River Capital.
Pacific Investments, set up in 1994, has controlling stakes in everything from warehouses in Asia to property managers in the City of London.
Red River Capital invested £3m in the Thames River Capital hedge fund and “his return on the deal would make a private equity financier’s eyes water,” the Financial Times reported in July 2006. Thames River was sold in April 2010 for £54m, netting Beckwith some £17m for his stake there.
Red River Capital, Beckwith’s company, made a healthy £36.6m profit on £65.5m sales in 2008-09, while Pacific Investments made £11.7m profit in 2008-09. Both are owned by Sir John and his trusts.
His more low-key brother, Peter, 65, is best known perhaps as the father of Tamara Beckwith, the It girl-about-town. He has invested in property and theatres.
But the brothers have also invested in sports-related businesses, which they sold on at a profit of at least£50m.
Further sales of properties since 2005 have also added several million pounds to the Beckwith coffers.
Adding hotels in France, and Sir John’s investment in the Model Frontiers fashion agency, we cut the value of the Beckwiths back to £270m as the sale of Red River was at a much lower price than mooted in recent times.
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61. William Ives & Family
£266m
Rainham Steel
2009: £282m (-£16m)
The man of steel is now supporting The Iron. Bill Ives, founder and owner of Rainham Steel, signed a three-year sponsorship deal in December 2009 with Championship football club Scunthorpe United, aka The Iron.
Ives, 67, a straight-talking Eastender and Conservative Party donor, is one of the biggest employers in Scunthorpe through his steel stockholding operation.
But it has not been immune from the recession and has had to cut jobs when the economy fell off a cliff in the autumn of 2008.
Ives started Rainham in 1973 as a new and reusable steel supplier. The company then diversified and started to target builders and builders’ merchants in the 1980s.
The parent company, Rainham Steel Holdings, made nearly £3m profit on £113m sales in 2008-09 but, adding in directors’ pay to the bottom line takes the profit to around £13m. This year it will be lucky to get into the black.
Despite this, Rainham is building a huge warehouse facility and Ives said that the group would start to hire again as soon as the economy recovered, although he did not expect to start doing so for another two years.
On its figures, Rainham is worth £120m. It is owned by Ives and his family trusts.
Property companies and other assets easily take Ives to £266m.
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62. Alan Lewis
£250m
Hartley Investment Trust
2009: £225m (+£25m)
Alan Lewis wrote in his chairman’s statement for his Hartley Investment Trust operation that he regarded the property crisis as “an opportunity” and that his group was ready to take advantage of investment opportunities that arise.
Among Hartley’s investments is Leeds-based J&J Crombie, which is best known for its legendary gents’ woollen topcoats favoured by generations of city slickers.
Lewis was not born into great wealth. His Welsh grandfather was a successful entrepreneur but his father gambled away the family’s money.
Hartley Investment Trust showed nearly £37.4m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts.
His British property portfolio, principally old industrial sites in Yorkshire, is worth at least £100m.
In addition, he has 4,000 acres of prime development land in Florida, where gas has been discovered, and forestry in Russia.
With other banking, hi-tech and property assets in Britain, America and Spain, Lewis, 72, is worth perhaps £250m in the current climate.
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62. Andreas Panayiotou
£250m
Ability Developments
2009: £250m (No change)
A new hotel opens at West London’s Syon Park in November. The £60m development on the Duke of Northumberland’s London acreage has been built by Andreas Panayiotou’s Ability Group. It will be managed by Hilton and takes Ability’s hotel portfolio to seven.
Panayiotou, 44, is a former boxer of Cypriot parentage famous for selling most of his residential portfolio at the end of 2006 in anticipation of a property crash.
He plans to develop a number of other Hilton hotels in the UK and Europe, with the intention of amassing a portfolio of over 40 hotel properties by 2012.
Ability Group has invested more than £300m in hotel assets over the past two years and expects to invest a further £1bn.
The total value of Panayiotou’s portfolio and assets is put at more than £600m. Ability Developments itself made £3.6m profit and showed £112m net assets in 2008.
The accounts of the other companies which should show more net assets remain confidential so we have not seen any further figures to take the valuation to that £640m.
Until we can see them, we are cautious and value Panayiotou at £250m.
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62. Marquess of Salisbury
£250m
Gascoyne Cecil Estates
2009: £250m (No change)
The 7th Marquess of Salisbury is where he loves to be – at the centre of Conservative politics.
In January 2010 he hosted a weekend of talks at his Hatfield seat aiming for a historic realignment that would see Northern Ireland’s two main unionist parties, the Ulster Unionists and the Democratic Unionists, merge with the Conservatives. It came to naught but reflected Salisbury’s passion for the union and his love of high Tory politics.
But it is, of course, ownership of Hatfield House that still puts Salisbury into this list. Completed in 1612, it is a treasure trove of hugely valuable paintings. The art is easily worth £125m, but we cut that in half to allow for any tax demands on any future sales.
Hatfield also has a 3,000-acre park and woodland, and a further vast acreage of farmland. In addition, there is Cranborne Manor, the family estate in Dorset from where Salisbury’s son, Lord Cranborne, sells his organic sausages.
Salisbury’s main farming company, Gascoyne Cecil Farms, made a £129,000 profit on £2.2m turnover in 2008-09 when it showed £4.9m net assets.
We can see more than £500,000 of net assets in smaller companies such as Perlpart Developments. Shrewdly, Salisbury is also developing the family’s London acreage round Leicester Square. The London estate, American land, the two stately homes with their surrounding 10,300 acres and the art collection keep Salisbury, 64, at £250m.
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65. Lord Iliffe & Family
£240m
Yattendon Investment Trust
2009: £220m (+£20m)
Earlier this year, Edward Iliffe, 65, won an appeal to build an octagonal eco-friendly home on Green Island in Poole Harbour.
The millionaire great-grandson of newspaper publisher Lord Iliffe bought the island for £2.5m. His application was originally rejected on the grounds that it was too big for the island.
Yattendon Investment Trust, the Iliffe family company, saw its profits plunge in 2009 from £24.6m to £1.2m on sales down sharply too at £97.8m. Its net assets came in at £240m. Yattendon had previously sold its Birmingham papers to an American publisher for £60m in 1987. It still has interests in media and TV, including more than 40 local newspapers. It also owns Channel TV, and has property and marina interests.
With property, estate assets and past dividends, we value the Iliffe family at £240m.
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66. Sir Stanley & Peter Thomas
£225m
Atlantic Property Developments
2009: £225m (No change)
Plans for a new £8m golf course near Cardiff were unveiled by Sir Stanley Thomas in September 2009. The 200-acre championship standard course will be designed by Welsh golfing legend Ian Woosnam, a friend of Thomas.
Knighted in the 2006 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to business and charities in Wales, Thomas can afford it. The family money comes originally from the much more mundane world of pies. The Thomas brothers, Stanley, 69, and Peter, 67, built up a large snack and pie business which they sold to GrandMet in 1988 for £75m. The family then went on to build the quoted TBI group, involved in property and then airports.
There was a near £106m payout for the family late in 2004 when TBI, owner of Luton airport, was taken over in a £551m deal by the Spanish infrastructure company, Abertis.
The family also has commercial property investments. A Spanish development, in which Peter had a 40% stake, was sold in 2005 for £75m. Another £40m in other Thomas ventures take the family to perhaps £225m.
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67. Christopher Moran
£220m
Chesterlodge
2009: £144m (+£76m)
Christopher Moran, who made his fortune in Lloyds and on the stock market in the 1980s and 1990s, has made even more in property since then. By his own admission, he is “astronomically wealthy”.
Chesterlodge, Moran’s main holding company, saw its net assets hit £210m in 2008-09, when it made a £1.7m profit on turnover of £7.9m. We value it at £200m in today’s climate.
Moran, 62, has been helping the NHS with designs for a £110m cancer centre to be opened by University College Hospital in central London by 2012.
He is also active in Tory politics and brokered a deal in February 2007 which made the Conservatives more than £30m from the sale of their old Smith Square headquarters.
For Moran, this activity followed on from restoration of the 15th century Crosby Hall on the banks of the Thames in Chelsea.
The private palace was built by City merchant Sir John Crosby in the 1460s and was later owned by Sir Thomas More.
Moran bought the freehold in 1988 for just £100,000 and has since spent around £50m on restoration. Moran, who had a controversial career in finance, should easily be worth £220m.
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67. Manny Davidson & Family
£220m
BL Davidson
2009: £200m (-£20m)
At 79, Manny Davidson is still active in the property market. His Manny Davidson Trust bought a portfolio of Guildford high street shops for £13.45m in December 2009.
But he lost his right-hand man in the family property empire in February 2009 when Jonathan Rose left to join the Pears family as group property director at the William Pears Group. Rose spent more than 12 years with the Davidson family, working with Manny and his son Gerald at Wolfe and Asda Properties.
Manny floated the business in 1985, before taking it private in a £232m deal with British Land in 2001 which saw it renamed BL Davidson. It showed £440m of net assets in 2005 when it made a £12.4m profit. The Davidson family’s 50% stake was worth £253m when it was taken over entirely by British Land (which had the other half already) in the summer of 2006.
Davidson has also owned other choice assets. The takeover of the Leopold Joseph merchant bank in early 2004 netted Davidson £5m for his stake.
Other assets such as Fungo, a property company, and Wolfe Securities, add £20m, taking the Davidson family to £220m after tax.
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67. Gerard O’Hare
£220m
O’Hare Developments
2009: £220m (No change)
Dr Gerard O’Hare was awarded a CBE in the December 2009 New Year’s Honours List for services to higher education and regeneration. He is a visiting professor at the University of Ulster.
The entrepreneur left his family building firm in his native Newry in 1997 to work on his own property developments.
A chartered surveyor by trade, he had previously worked on projects in Northern Ireland through the 1990s, including Belfast’s Waterfront.
His Parker Green International company is behind some of the North’s most important retail developments and he has further shopping centres in the South, including the Quays in Newry.
O’Hare, 52, has also been active overseas. He added to his US interests with two investments in the New York commuter belt valued at more than £125m in July 2007.
The company also bought a shopping mall in Connecticut, the Millford Retail Centre, for £50m. O’Hare has acquired a mixed bag of investment and development assets in Central and Eastern Europe.
With personal property and assets included, he should still be worth around £220m, despite the collapse in asset values.
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67. Robert Rayne & Family
£220m
Derwent London
2009: £125m (+£95m)
Quoted property group Derwent has seen its share price rise smartly in 2009-10 and it is now worth just over £1.45bn.
The business is chaired by Robert Rayne, the 61-year-old son of property tycoon Lord Rayne, who died in 2003.
His death robbed London of one of its shrewdest property developers. After war service with the RAF, Lord Rayne turned his family’s tailoring operation into a property business and pioneered development on the fringe of the City.
He left £119.6m in his British will, which excluded assets held in France.
The Rayne family’s London Merchant Securities merged with Derwent Valley in 2006 and they have a stake in Derwent London which is worth around £195m.
In 2006, the family demerged its investment division into a new company called LMS Capital and the Rayne family has a stake there now worth £24m.
Taking into account some hefty charitable donations, we value the Rayne family at £220m.
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71. Alastair & Michael Powell
£209m
Cable Properties & Investments
2009: £205m (+£4m)
Cleveland Cable saw its profits fall sharply from £27.2m to £6.1m on sales up from £217m to £190.6m in 2008-09. The net assets rose from £117.8m to £122.1m.
A property operation, Cable Properties & Investments, showed nearly £72m net assets in the same period. Between them the two companies showed nearly £194m net assets.
We value the companies together at that figure. Alistair, 58, and Michael Powell, 53, own all the shares in both. Past dividends and other smaller companies take them to around £209m.
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72. Bert & Maurice Allen
£208m
Bewley Hotels
New entry
Slaney Meats group, a Wexford-based meat processor, owned by brothers Bert, 71, and Maurice Allen, 68, showed more than £71m net assets in 2008.
From its profits the Allens built a property portfolio through which they netted around £190m when they sold their Bewley hotel chain in 2007.
The brothers reinvested some of this in German property and are now moving into the bioenergy field. They should easily be worth around £208m.
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73. Martin Ainscough & Family
£200m
Ainscough Strategic Land
New entry
Martin Ainscough, 58, is now devoting more of his time to extensive charitable works.
He and his cousin Bill, founder of Wainhomes, are funding the £6.5m Wigan Boys and Girls’ Club.
Local football supremo Dave Whelan is also involved with Ainscough.Whelan, owner of Wigan Athletic football club and the DW Sports Fitness retail and leisure chain, won consent for the youth facility in May this year.
Ainscough Crane Hire was founded in 1976 by Gerard Ainscough. The Wigan-based company was run by his three sons Martin, James and Brendan, until its sale for £255m in October 2007 to its managers.
The Ainscough family had around 90% of the shares worth around £230m. After tax and allowing for other assets, which include various Ainscough companies, such as Ainscough Investments, the family should be worth perhaps £200m.
They are now investing heavily in property through Ainscough Strategic Land, which looks for sites to hold and develop on a long-term basis.
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73. Michael Oglesby & Family
£200m
Bruntwood
2009: £295m (-£95m)
Michael Oglesby’s Bruntwood is still actively buying good quality sites. In July, it exchanged contracts to buy the City House development site in Leeds city centre for £5m.
After leaving school at 16, Oglesby was an apprentice plumber to his father, before both realised it wasn’t working and he went to college to do a degree in building. In 1970, he moved from Scunthorpe to Manchester, forming Bruntwood five years later. Oglesby, 71, is now one of the most high-profile property tycoons in the North West.
Bruntwood is easily the busiest developer in Manchester. He owns more than 80 office buildings in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. The main family operation, Bruntwood , saw its profits increase slightly £11.5m to £12.6m on £97.1m sales in the year to September 2009. Its net assets came in at £146.1m. In the current climate, we value it on the net asset figure. Other assets plus smaller but separate Bruntwood operations take the Oglesby family to £200m.
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75. Charles Kenny & Family
£198m
Clancourt
2009: £200m (-£2m)
The Kenny family own most of Clancourt Group, owner of office blocks in Dublin’s Harcourt Street.
The company is unlimited but its main subsidiary showed £247m net assets in its last filed accounts for 2005.
Clancourt started the largest single speculative development in Dublin for many years – a £200m scheme near St Stephen’s Green.
South Dublin-based Charles Kenny, 75, has been developing and managing prime office buildings in the city since the 1960s. The group has also been active in Limerick where it sold the Parkway Shopping Centre in 2006 for a sum reported at £38m.
With other assets, including The Crescent, Limerick’s largest shopping centre, we value the Kenny family at £198m in today’s difficult economy.
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76. Joseph Brennan & Family
£197m
Joseph Brennan Bakeries
2009: £170m (+£27m)
Profits at family-owned Joseph Brennan Bakeries, Dublin’s biggest bakery, approached £3.6m on sales of £45.7m in its last accounts filed for 2007.
The Brennans also have some substantial property assets in London, including the Versace shop in Bond Street and the Hamley building in Regent Street.
Other assets, such as Century Finance, take the Brennan family led by 68-year-old Joseph Brennan, to £197m in today’s market.
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77. David Mabey & Family
£196m
Mabey Holdings,
2009: £200m (-£4m)
Mabey Holdings was started by the late Bevil Mabey (who died in April this year) after the second world war when he bought up spare Bailey bridges from the army.
The Reading-based firm has 13 offshoots that specialise in plant hire, steel fabrication, property and construction-related operations.
One of its subsidiaries, Mabey Bridge, has unveiled plans for a £38m expansion aimed at making it the biggest UK manufacturer of wind turbine towers for onshore and offshore sites. The expansion will create 240 jobs, mostly in Chepstow.
David Mabey, 49, used to chair the family-owned operation. In the year to September 2009 it went from a £217,000 loss to an £18.2m profit, though sales were down nearly £24m at £153.3m.
With £206.4m net assets, the company should be worth £140m in the current climate. Dividends, which have totalled nearly £68m since 1996, and the separate Hare Hatch Holdings with nearly £28m net assets, would normally take the Mabey family to £200m after tax and spending. But its Mabey & Johnson subsidiary was fined £3.5m recently for breaching UN sanctions against Iraq and systematically bribing foreign officials with so-called “white man’s handshakes”.
Accordingly, we cut the Mabey family back to £196m, even though it was the parent company which owned up to its subsidiary’s wrongdoings.
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78. Manfred Gorvy & Family
£195m
Hanover Acceptances
2009: £170m (+£25m)
Manfred Gorvy’s diversified property outfit, Hanover Acceptances, went from a£3.7m loss in 2008 to a £26m profit in 2009, with sales rising sharply by £16m to £684m.
The business, with £206m net assets, is owned by a Luxembourg-based parent called Quadriga Holdings SA. It should be worth £180m in the current climate. But we assume that the Gorvy family, well represented on the board, is the ultimate owner and value the family at £195m with past dividends.
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79. Alan Murphy
£190m
Nikal Investments
2009: £180m (+£10m)
Manchester-based developer Nikal remained under the radar locally last year but has been making progress with work at Humber Quays in Hull, while working up revised plans for the much-delayed Altair in Altrincham.
As the recession subsides, it is also gearing up for a major new scheme in Salford, the £25m Soapworks, which won planning consent in May. Nikal, which showed just £377,000 net assets in 2008, is bankrolled by tycoon Alan Murphy, 62, whose wealth though came from more prosaic sources. He worked for Carnation foods and Gillette before opening his own supermarket.
He sold up and in 1982, after becoming involved in the wholesale paper trade, Murphy started AM Paper, which turned big reels of tissue into toilet rolls.
Fifteen years later, in 1997, after AM had grown sharply on the back of £30m investment in new equipment, Murphy sold part of his stake for £100m, and two years later, the rest for £50m.
With the property deals and personal assets, we reckon this fanatical Liverpool supporter should be worth £190m today.
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79. Irvine & James Sellar
£190m
Sellar Properties
2009: £165m (+£25m)
Construction is well under way at the site of the Shard of Glass, Europe’s tallest mixed-use building – designed by architect Renzo Piano – which will soar 1,016ft above London Bridge Station in 2012.
The 87-storey tower is part of the £2bn London Bridge quarter and is the culmination of years of labour for developer Irvine Sellar, 72. Sellar, who works with his son James, 37, on property developments, has a 20% stake in the tower, which is backed by four Qatari banks.
We can see around £134m net assets in a dozen Sellar companies. Not bad for a former market trader who became king of Carnaby Street fashion before selling up in 1980 and moving into property. In 1991 his quoted property group went bust and he lost £28m. But he has fought back since then.
Through his Sellar Property Group, he now owns a property investment portfolio comprising hotels, offices and shopping centres. With the tower now very much a reality, we value the Sellars at £190m.
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81. Sten Mortstedt & Family
£186m
CLS Holdings
2009: £190m (-£4m)
The Mortstedt family’s stake in CLS Holdings is now worth around £145m. Share sales of more than £93m (including £27m in 2006, £6m in 2008 and £22.5m in a 2009 share buyback) make the family very well-heeled.
CLS – a former investor in the Shard of Glass development at London Bridge – has been active recently as a seller in the UK, France and Sweden, while also buying other assets in Germany.
The low-key Mortstedt, 70, a Swedish national, has been on the board of CLS as chairman since 1994.
The shares recovered after the crash but in early 2010 they started to drift down again. We value the Mortstedt family at around £186m.
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82. The Duke of Buccleuch & Family
£180m
Buccleuch Estates
2009: £180m (No change)
Buccleuch Estates, the property arm of the Buccleuch family, recovered from an £18m loss to a £7m loss in 2009 with sales down sharply at £40.6m and net assets down £10m at £108.3m.
The group has been re-orientating its business, selling its estate agency and game and country enterprises operation, which included the Spratts game food brand.
Meanwwhile, it is building a rural property management operation and concentrating on commercial property activities, renewable energy, tourism and sustainable food. This highlights the ambitions of the Buccleuch Group, which extend beyond the huge land holdings of the 10th duke, 56. The immensely popular 9th duke, Europe’s largest landowner, left £320m in his will.
The art treasures and antique furniture were valued in the will at £224m. But in practice with our treatment of aristocratic art works, we cut that back to take account of any likely tax bill should the new duke want to sell.
In his case it would be 40%, so we reduce our art valuation accordingly to £134m.
While the family’s huge land holdings were never very valuable and cost a huge amount in upkeep, diversification into property is paying dividends. In all, we still value the new duke at £180m.
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82. Kevin McCabe & Family
£180m
Scarborough
2009: £175m (+£5m)
Kevin McCabe’s Scarborough has had a frenetic year. In February, it bought Modus from the administrators for £37m, and in April the group went through a financial restructuring.
In July, McCabe put the 100,000 sq ft Glasgow HQ of Bank of Scotland on the market at £40m, a 6% yield. In the same month, planning permission was granted for a three-acre former site in Congleton, Cheshire, acquired through the Modus deal.
McCabe, 62, has significant leisure interests in China too, including a controlling stake in a Chinese football club called Chengdu Blades.
His Scarborough Group has a substantial stake in the Chinese property company Top Spring Group, which is involved in developments in 11 major and fast-growing cities across China.
McCabe has the firepower for this. He trained as a quantity surveyor, and started working for Bovis in 1964 at the age of 16.
He joined the Teesland property group in 1971 and nine years later formed the Scarborough Property Co. He sold the bulk of his property empire to Valad, an Australian property group, in June 2007 – just before the property crash – for £865m, which included debt. McCabe’s proceeds from the original sale should have been the £142.7m we can see paid out to his family and trusts in a special dividend from the Scarborough Group in 2007-08.
Even after that, its new parent company, Scarborough Group International, showed £88.4m net assets in 2008-09. With the dividend and his Chinese investments, we value the McCabe family at £180m.
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82. Stuart Wall
£180m
Opal Property Group
2009: £180m (No change)
Manchester-based Opal Property group is the biggest provider of high-quality student accommodation in Britain. At the end of July it put two properties, one in Exeter and one in London, on the market with a £53m price tag. It also provides affordable accommodation for key workers such as NHS staff.
The company, founded in 1982 by Stuart Wall, made a loss of £24.6m in 2009 but, with net assets of £209.5m, should be worth perhaps £180m in the current climate.
Wall, 59, owns it all.
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85.David Coffer
£175m
Coffer Group
2009: £150m (+£25m)
The final 50% stake in the Earls Court and Olympia exhibition centre operation held by David Coffer and Anthony Lyons was sold in early 2010 to property giant Liberty International.
Coffer’s property investments operation, St James Capital, bought the centre in May 2004 for £245m. With a career spanning more than 35 years in the property and leisure sectors, the move was one of the highlights in his career.
Three years later, the first 50% stake was sold to Liberty in a deal that valued the exhibition operation at £380m.
Coffer continues to lead leisure agent Davis Coffer Lyons and there are various other Coffer Group companies with juicy assets, too. In all, Coffer, 63, should be worth at least £175m.
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85. Terence Cole
£175m
Marcol
2009: £175m (No change)
London property entrepreneurs Mark Steinberg and Terence Cole teamed up with a private equity company in late 2009 to buy Median, Germany’s biggest rehabilitation care provider, which operates 27 acute clinics with around 6,000 beds in 19 locations across the country.
It was a typically astute move by the pair who run Marcol, a London-based company set up in 1978 to acquire real estate throughout the UK and Europe. It comprises at least 40 companies that develop and own property across Europe.
Steinberg and Tory party donor Cole, 78, have grown a large portfolio with investments in the care home, residential, industrial, retail and office sectors.
The group also includes Industrial Securities, which specialises in business parks, warehouses and distribution space.
The pair have been shrewd in their dealings and sold off large parts of their portfolios while retaining some assets to work up in value.
With 360 directorships listed at Companies House, Cole’s holdings are diverse. The largest company we can see is Compco Holdings, which showed nearly £143m net assets in 2008-09. Cole has a 40% stake in its parent. But his other assets take him to a conservative £175m.
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85. Mark Steinberg
£175m
Marcol
2009: £175m (No change)
Mark Steinberg, Terrence Cole’s partner, runs Marcol, the London-based property company the pair set up in 1978.
Steinberg, 51, is also a serial director with more than 375 companies to his name. The largest firm we can see at Companies House is Compco Holdings, which showed nearly £143m net assets in 2008-09.
Steinberg has a 40% stake in its parent. But his other directorships should easily keep him at a very conservative £175m.
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88. Lord Foster
£168m
Foster Holdings
2009: £170m (-£2m)
Architectural group Foster & Partners has been hit hard by the global slump in construction on Earth and is hoping for better luck on the Moon.
It is part of a group hoping to win a contract from the European Space Agency to test materials for building settlements on the lunar surface. The mission, to develop a “more permanent presence on the Moon”, is part of the Aurora space programme.
Born in Stockport in 1935, young Norman Foster performed well at school but left at 16 to work in the Manchester City Treasurer’s office.
He did his national service in the RAF and when demobbed in 1961 went to the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture & City Planning.
In 1967, he set up his own practice which later became Foster & Partners. Now regarded as one of the world’s top architects, he is best known for projects such as Hong Kong’s new airport, the redesigned Reichstag in Berlin, the Hearst Tower in New York and the Gherkin in the City.
Foster had an 85% stake until he sold a 40% share to 3i, the private equity giant, in May 2007. The deal valued the business then at around £300m. Foster should have received around £120m and be left with a stake worth £135m at the time.
Though the company made a £38.5m profit on £152.1m sales in 2008-09. With past salaries and property assets he should be worth £170m after tax. We knock off the £2m he recently donated to Yale University’s School of Architecture to fund a professorship in his name.
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89. Francis & Shamus Jennings
£166m
Cusp
2009: £146m (+£20m)
One of Northern Ireland’s leading companies, the Rotary Group, was taken over by Australian firm Hastie Group in a deal worth almost £100m in February 2008. But Ballyrogan Holdings (Rotary’s holding company at the time of the sale) is still owned by the Jennings family. Shamus Jennings, 56, is now chairman.
Ballyrogan made a £1m profit and showed nearly £43m net assets in the year to September 2009. The Jennings family also owns the Cusp property group, which recently spent £75m on buying a retail park at Kendal as part of a wave of spending by Ulster investors on the mainland.
Cusp, a successful developer, is working on the £100m St Anne’s Square development in Belfast. Cusp reckons its property portfolio is worth £500m. It showed £95.2m net assets in 2009, and we value it at £80m in the current depressed climate. After tax on the Rotary proceeds and past dividends, the Jennings family should be worth £166m.
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90. Henry Moser & Family
£165m
Jerrold Holdings
2009: £165m (No change)
Co-founded by low-key Henry Moser in 1973, Jerrold Holdings specialises in secured lending to both residential and commercial customers. Moser, 61, left school at 16 and worked on stalls as a market trader.
Jerrold Holdings saw its profits rise slightly from £68.7m to £69m on sales of nearly £149.5m in the year to June 2009. Barclays Private Equity invested £113.5m for a 30% stake in September 2006.
Cautiously, we value the business at £200m in the current climate. That values the Moser family stake at £140m. Past dividends should add £25m.
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90.Gary Widdowson
£165m
Kenninghall Holdings
2009: £160m (+£5m)
Gary Widdowson spent £25m on a 2,000 acre Norfolk estate in September 2008. He can afford it. His father founded GD Metal Recycling, with one depot in north London.
But it was Gary, 52, who became the scrap metal king of London. In February 2006, he sold the renamed Metal & Waste Recycling to Barclays for an undisclosed sum, but reckoned to be up to £120m. Widdowson kept a 22% stake in the company, which processes about 700,000 tonnes of scrap metal and made £11.8m profit on a turnover of £189m in 2009.
Widdowson has diversified into property through Kenninghall Holdings, with around £15.7m of net assets in 2009. He owns a private dock on the Thames and another waste company, Total Waste Management. He has also accumulated a war chest for property investments.
Essex-based Widdowson should easily be worth £165m in the current climate.
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92. Eliasz Englander & Family
£162m
Citywise
2009: £160m (+£2m)
Englander, 78, has 138 directorships and a complex web of companies. Through Citywise, the Englander family owns Holborn Links with over £131m net assets in 2008, when it made an £8.4m profit.
The family also has several other separate, smaller companies with net assets totalling at least £100m.
In all, and allowing for overlapping stakes, the Englander family is easily worth £162m.
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93. Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe & Family
£160m
Calthorpe Estates
2009: £160m (No change)
Calthorpe Holdings plunged into a £12.85m loss in 2008-09 when its net assets also fell sharply from £21.6m to £6.5m.
The company has been involved in an ambitious development programme in the Calthorpe estate, which covers 1,550 acres of leafy Edgbaston.
This includes the award-winning £40m Calthorpe House, the £110m Edgbaston Galleries development and a £100m University Science Park plan for the former BBC site at Pebble Mill.
It had to sell off assets and change its strategy to conserve cash during the severe property downturn. But there was some relief in March this year when it secured food retailer, Morrisons, as a tenant for its Galleries development.
The estate dates back to 1717 but it was in 1985 that Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe inherited his title from his late grandfather and the estate was part of his inheritance. The estate would now be worth perhaps £80m. His trusts made around £40m profit in 1999 by selling off 300 acres in Hampshire for development.
Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, 44, also has interests in America and property in Europe. We still value him at £160m.
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93. John Berkley & Family
£160m
The Berkeley Leisure Group
2009: £150m (+£10m)
John Berkley chairs the Berkeley Leisure Group, a largely family-owned mobile home operator and property developer based in Yeovil.
In 2008, its profits fell sharply from £18m to £5.2m on sales of £15.9m (the 2007 figure had been inflated by the sale of an asset).
The company has £56.8m worth of freehold properties but states in its 2008 annual report that they are worth around £100m more than the book value.
The shares are largely owned by Berkley, 76, and his family, who take little out of the business. We value them at £160m.
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93. Frank Boyd & Family
£160m
Killultagh Estates
2009: £115m (+£45m)
William Ewart Properties is one of the largest property companies in Northern Ireland. In March 2010, the company appointed Franc Warwick to find a buyer for its Victoria Place, Fulham Broadway and Hammersmith Broadway shopping centres in London, with a £300m price tag.
Victoria Place, at Victoria railway station, has been sold to Network Rail for £95m.
William Ewart’s net assets though fell from £282m to £238.1m in 2008, when it made a £3.8m profit after an £8m loss the previous year.
The company was formed in 2002 when Frank Boyd and Andrew Creighton paid £90m for the Northern Ireland and British properties of a southern property group called Dunloe Ewart. They each own 50%.
Boyd, 56, started out as an electrician and owned an electrical contracting business in Belfast.
He began his career as a property developer and investor in student housing before moving on to acquiring nursing home sites and office market opportunities.
One of his other companies, Killultagh Estates, is owned by his trusts, and has developed into one of the leading property companies in Northern Ireland.
It showed its financial muscle in September 2005 when it snapped up the Fareham Shopping Centre in Hampshire for £110m.
Killultagh Estates had £51.4m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts. We can see another £12m of net assets in other Boyd companies.
In all, while we can see £182m of net assets attributable to Boyd and his family, we cautiously value the family at £160m in the current climate.
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93. Michael Herbert & Family
£160m
Lebreh
2009: £145m (+£15m)
Herbert, voted Northern Ireland’s top property man in 2006, is also a restaurant tycoon.
Herbel Restaurants, based in Belfast, holds the largest Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Europe and also acts as a franchise for Haagan-Dazs ice cream.
Founded by Herbert in 1981, Herbel prospered through The Troubles as few rival fast food chains dared venture into Belfast and other Northern Ireland towns.
The business has also opened in the Irish Republic and Scotland. Herbel made a £4.1m loss on £64.7m sales in 2008, when it had net assets of nearly £80m, and we still value the business at £60m.
Herbert, 53, has also branched out into property development in Belfast and Scotland in a big way. His Lebreh operation had £111.2m net assets in its 2008 accounts. It should be worth £110m.
In all, Herbert and his family are easily worth £160m in the current climate.
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93. Brian Scowcroft & Family
£160m
Alard Properties
2009: £160m (No change)
Brian Scowcroft’s business interests seem to be faring pretty well. He has over 100 tenants occupying around 1.5m sq feet of new or refurbished buildings at his Kingmoor Park on the site of an old RAF base.
Even so, the net assets of the Kingmoor Park Properties operation fell £14m in 2008-09 to around £20m. He has ploughed around £7m of his own money into the 400-acre Kingmoor site and, with it, helped create more than 1,300 jobs.
It is the flagship in Scowcroft’s business park portfolio, which includes sites in Stockport and Leigh, as well as an operation in Wrexham.
Before his property work, Scowcroft, 54, was boss of Swinton Insurance.
It was founded in the front room of his father’s Manchester house in 1957 and became one of the largest car insurance companies in Britain.
In 1988, the family started selling stakes in the firm to Sun Alliance. By the early 1990s, the Scowcroft family had made around £150m from the sale.
Scowcroft, a qualified chartered accountant, went into industrial sites as he had the capital to acquire the land cheaply.
In all, with the success of Kingmoor Park, the earlier Swinton proceeds and personal assets, we value the Scowcroft family, which includes his low-key sister, Janet Lefton, 52, at around £160m.
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98. John Lynch & Family
£152m
John Lynch (Builders)
2009: £152m (No change)
John Lynch, 61, chairs the family-owned John Lynch (Builders), an Ayr-based property-to-construction group which has been built up over the past 39 years.
The group had £11m net assets in December 2008. But under Lynch’s shrewd management, significant land holdings of around 280 acres of development land in Scotland built up over the years are currently worth around £100m.
Other assets such as farms, investments and properties take the Lynch family to around £152m in the current economic climate.
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99.Paul Caddick & Family
£150m
Caddick Group
2009: £90m (+£60m)
Paul Caddick founded Yorkshire-based Caddick Group in 1979 and it has evolved into a high-quality property-to-construction operation.
The group was involved in the planned 1m sq ft Trinity Leeds shopping destination but, in November 2009, its 25% stake was sold to its partner, Land Securities.
Caddick had bought the stake in 2007 for £75m.
Caddick is expanding fast in retirement homes through its Oakbridge Retirement Villages joint venture, which plans to build three retirement villages in the UK each year.
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.
But the lack of England test matches at Headingley until 2012 is likely to hit its finances hard.
In the year to August 2009, Caddick Group made a £2.8m loss on £64.6m sales while net assets came in at £42.5m.
The Caddick family – led by 60-year-old Paul Caddick – and trusts own more than 90% of the shares.
Other private assets and sale proceeds take the Caddick family to around £150m.
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99.Charles Clowes
£150m
Clowes Developments
2009: £130m (+£20m)
East Midlands entrepreneur Charles Clowes bought Wilson Bowden Developments’ 290-acre industrial and distribution portfolio for the knock-down price of £46m in late 2008.
Clowes Developments, established more than 40 years ago, has an impressive record of commercial, retail and residential development.
These include industrial parks, industrial land in Corby, Birmingham, Wednesfield, Castle Donnington and the Dove Valley Park in Derbyshire.
Its investment properties include three in central London – in Harley Street, Eaton Place and Edgware Road.
Clowes owns all the shares in the company which made £1.9m profit on £11.4m sales in 2008-09.
It has nearly £59m net assets but reports in the property press suggest that Clowes is looking to sell up for £300m.
We cannot accept that valuation and, in the current climate, we settle for £150m for 70-year-old Clowes.
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99. David Gabbay & Family
£150m
O&H Capital
2009: £250m (-£100m)
Gabbay and partner Eli Shahmoon have had a tough time recently but still have substantial assets in their O&H property operation.
O&H Holdings saw its net assets fall sharply from £478m to £255.5m in 2008-09.
The parent company has been reorganised but we assume that the Gabbay and Shahmoon families own half. In the current climate, we value the business on the net assets. In all, we reckon Gabbay, 66, and his family must be worth around £150m with past salaries (more than £30m from 2001-08).
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99. Nick Leslau
£150m
Prestbury Investments
2009: £130m (+£20m)
Nick Leslau managed to float his Max Property Group on the stock market in May 2009 valued at £220m. It was the first flotation in London of the year and raised £20m more than planned.
Max intends to exploit the weakness in the UK property market by picking up bargains. The company is now worth £224m, valuing Leslau’s stake at £20.4m.
The son of a jeweller, Leslau grew up in a modest three-bedroom house in Cricklewood, north London. In his 20s, he was a part-time model and appeared as an extra in pop videos.
After training as a chartered surveyor, he teamed up with Nigel Wray to build Burford Group into a £1 billion business.
In 1997, he started his Prestbury operation, which he co-owns with Wray. Leslau correctly anticipated the property slump, and the pair sold off properties well before the start of the credit crunch.
Leslau redeployed the money elsewhere in budget hotels, private healthcare and theme parks, all of which hold up well in recessions.
These assets have been secured on long leases with regular upward rent reviews.
Prestbury Investment Holdings had £65m net assets in 2009, and Leslau has a near 52% stake. In the current climate, we value it at £100m.
The profits from past deals, his Max stake, hefty dividends of more than £40m since 2000, and his personal property assets, easily take Leslau, 51, to £150m, even in today’s still difficult market.
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99.Sir Robert Ogden
£150m
Ogden Group,
2009: £115m (+£35m)
Sir Robert Ogden received a crushing blow in 2009 when his race horse Exotic Dancer died at Aintree, but he has another stable star in the shape of Voy Por Ustedes.
Ogden, a long time racehorse owner, made his fortune through coal. But his long association with the industry ended in 2006 when he sold his coal washing and processing business – A Ogden & Sons – for £24.5m. He has a number of property businesses and assets which underwrite Ogden’s passion for horseflesh (he was a big purchaser at the Tattersalls, Newmarket, bloodstock auctions in late 2009).
Ogden now runs a number of companies from his Yorkshire base, including Condor Aviation, Ogden Properties and Nevison Properties, with more than £68m net assets between them in 2008. But with many other private interests and the fine collection of horses, the 74-year-old Ogden is easily worth £150m.
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99. Eli Shahmoon & Family
£150m
O&H Capital
2009: £250m (-£100m)
Eli Shahmoon, 43, is the partner of David Gabbay in the London-based property-to-construction group, O&H Holdings, which showed around £255.5m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts.
O&H capitalised on renewed demand from the institutions at the end of last year with the sale of an office block on Conduit Street, W1, to Threadneedle for £24.1m – a 6.38% yield.
The Shahmoon family owns half of the business. Past salaries, dividends and other assets should take the Shahmoons to £150m.
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105. Nick Capstick-Dale
£148m
UK Real Estate
2009: £122m (+£26m)
Property investor Nick Capstick-Dale made a smart move by investing early in the area surrounding London’s Kings Cross. He spent nearly £4m in June 2006 buying The Lighthouse building at the junction of Gray’s Inn Road in London.
It is the first building that anyone leaving King’s Cross sees and work finally started on the site in the summer of 2010 with a completely new building behind the old facade.
It follows on from Capstick-Dale’s new Covent Garden-style leisure-to-retail complex which he built in the heart of the area.
With the Eurostar trains now using the St Pancras international terminal and a huge regeneration underway, he is in the right area at the right time.
Capstick-Dale, 48, learnt about property working for an estate agency for four years. In 1986, he started trading in property and, 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, now with around £150m net assets.
Capstick-Dale has very low borrowings and has been able to buy sites in the downturn at huge discounts.
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106. Ken Rohan
£147m
Airspace Investments
2009: £165m (-£18m)
Profits at Irish property company Airspace Investments fell sharply in 2008 from £26.3m to £7.1m when it showed £125m net assets. In May 2009, owner Ken Rohan, a 66-year-old veteran property man from Wicklow, gave each of his three children a 14.8% stake in the company.
Rohan is involved in the industrial sector, concentrating on the north side of Dublin as well as a range of other interests in Ireland, Britain and Barbados. Rohan also has a strong UK property portfolio.
He worked in the London Stock Exchange before returning to Ireland to join the Rohan Group, which was set up in the 1960s by his brother, John. Ken Rohan became managing director of the group in the 1970s.
We can see another £3m net assets attributable to Rohan in other smaller companies.
In all, with other assets and recent dividends, he should be worth £147m in the current climate.
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107. Graham Harris
£145m
London & City Group Holdings
2009: £117m (+£28m)
Graham Harris owns London & City Group Holdings, a London-based property operation, where he is also a director.
The company specialises in the fast-moving and ever-changing London lettings market and the super-prime market in France in Paris and around the Alps.
In 2008-09, London & City made £689,000 profit on £48.6m sales, but its net assets jumped from £138.8m to £143.3m.
The company reports strong demand for its French assets and its London commercial properties and expects that its rental income will grow to £50m over the next three years. It has no funding problems, despite the banking crisis.
We value the business on the net asset figure. With other assets, Harris, 63, should easily be worth £145m.
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107. Gerald Ronson & Family
£145m
Heron
2009: £180m (-£35m)
Gerald Ronson’s £500m Heron Tower in the City has now reached its full 46 storeys, and in July secured its first tenant.
Ronson, 71, put in £44m of his own money, and the Oman government backed him in late 2006 to finance what he calls a “six-star” scheme. After seven years in construction, the 794 ft structure will be ready in 2011. Even so, Ronson is cautious in his plans.
Next to the tower he is developing the 24-storey Heron Plaza. But he is now looking to turn that into a 5-star hotel development rather than yet more offices. This is why Ronson is regarded in property circles with awe for his ability to do a deal, spot a bargain or make a turn.
In the 1970s and 1980s Ronson built his Heron property empire and a £600m fortune. Then he became embroiled in the 1986 Guinness scandal. Ronson served six months of a 12-month sentence in Ford Open Prison after being convicted of secret share buying agreements in connection with Guinness’s £2.8bn bid for the Distillers drinks company.
At the same time, Heron nearly went bankrupt, a victim of the early 1990s property downturn. But Ronson emerged from prison and rebuilt the operation – something he makes much of in his 2009 autobiography.
Heron International, the parent company, made a £22m profit and showed £434.5m net assets in 2008. Ronson earned a £12.9m salary in 2007. Outside Heron, Ronson has the Snax 24 petrol retailing business which made £1.9m profit on £197.2m sales in 2008, when it showed nearly £43m net assets. With strong cash reserves, it is easily worth £60m.
Ronson revealed recently that over the past 25 to 30 years he has given away £35m to charities. On the back of this huge generosity we clip him back to £145m.
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109. Clinton McCarthy & Family
£140m
Churchill Retirement Living
2009: £115m (+£25m)
Specialist house builder Churchill Retirement Living predicts a shortfall of 62,500 retirement homes by 2020. As a result, it is defying the downturn by buying 60 new sites.
The Hampshire-based operation, which in the year to May 2010 is expected to make a £4.5m profit, is run by brothers Spencer and Clinton McCarthy, 46.
They learnt all about the retirement home market from their father, John McCarthy. He set up McCarthy & Stone, which was floated on the stock market in 1982.
He grew the business but left in 2004 after backing a first rebuffed bid for the operation by his sons. McCarthy stood down as chairman and sold his stake for £74.4m. His sons are very much in the driving seat at Churchill Retirement, which has recently been valued at about £120m.
With the earlier sale proceeds and other assets, we value the McCarthy family at £140m.
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110. Chris Marshall & Family
£136m
Marshall Holdings
2009: £130m (+£6m)
Profits fell in 2008 from £16.3m to £5m on sales down from £114.8m to £107.2m at Chris Marshall’s Leeds-based company, Marshall Holdings.
Credited with being the most successful speculative developer in the region, Marshall, 71, runs the company started by his great grandfather in 1901 in a very low-key manner.
Not that he needs publicity for when he does a deal the rest of the market sits up and takes notice. Marshall reckons that with a solid balance sheet and a good relationship with the banks, Marshall Holdings is well positioned to take advantage of any upturn.
Despite the economic climate, Marshall Holdings’ net assets rose from £153.7m to just under £160m in 2008, demonstrating its resilience. It is easily worth £130m.
We add £6m for past dividends to the Marshall family.
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111. Anthony Brotherton-Ratcliffe & Family
£135m
Croudace Holdings and Maybrook
2009: £125m (+£10m)
Croudace Homes recovered in 2009, moving from a £28.4m loss into a £1.5m profit. The Caterham-based company has more than £77.3m net assets.
The planned £100m sale of the business had been abandoned in May 2008.
The potential buyer, Hyde Housing Association, wanted to cut its price in the light of the credit crunch and subsequent collapse in the housing market.
Croudace Homes is but one part of the property-to-housebuilding operation run by the Brotherton-Ratcliffe family.
Croudace was actually founded in 1946 by Oliver Croudace and initially involved in minor contracting works.
Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who served in the RAF with distinction during the second world war, arrived as a partner and bought out the business entirely in 1950. He died in 2009, aged 90.
But the business still remains in family hands and is now run by his son Anthony, 60.
Aside from Croudace Homes Group, the family also own Croudace Properties Group and Maybrook Properties, which are faring well.
Between them, the two made around £8.3m profit in 2008 when they showed over £89m net assets.
In the light of the failed sale, we value the three businesses at around £120m.
Other assets, including £35m of dividends from 1993-2005, take the family to around £135m after tax.
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111. John Guthrie & Family
£135m
Broadland Properties
2009: £120m (+£15m)
A chartered surveyor by training, John Guthrie chairs Broadland Properties, the Scarborough property operation.
The business, which was started in 1950, saw its profits fall to just £2.2m on £27.8m sales in the year to September 2009. But we value Broadland at £120m, slightly below its £127m net assets.
Guthrie was the biggest winner from the May 2005 sale of the Merchant Retail business to Hong Kong billionaire, Li Ka-Shing, for £222m cash.
Guthrie, 74, picked up 10% of the company “many years ago” when the shares were trading at just 9p. The takeover price valued each share at 197p, so Guthrie made a profit of around £22.3m on the deal.
Other assets, such as White Rose Finance (£5m net assets) should take the Guthrie family to perhaps £135m after tax.
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111. Peter Horton & Family
£135m
Hortons’ Estates
2009: £160m (-£25m)
Horton Estates made £6.3m profit on £15.3m sales in the year to September 2009, but the net assets fell sharply from £149.8m to £116.2m.
However, in the period from 1996-2009, the family had £36m of dividends before tax.
Peter Horton, 41, now leads the Horton family on the board of Hortons’ Estates as deputy chairman, following the retirement of Michael Horton as chairman in 2008. The family-owned company remains one of the Midland’s largest property investment and development companies with a portfolio across the retail, leisure, office and industrial sectors.
We value the company at £115m, slightly below the net asset figure, adding more than £20m for past dividends and other assets after tax to the Horton family.
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114. Tony Bramall & Family
£132m
Bramall Properties
2009: £92m (+£40m)
Tony Bramall spent £18.5m in February 2009 acquiring a Leeds office block using his own money and no debt. It was seen as a cash-rich buyer taking advantage of falling property prices.
Bramall’s money comes from the car trade. After training as an accountant and working in a Sheffield estate agency, he began his life-long association with the car trade in 1963 when he joined his father’s Sheffield-based car dealer, later taking over the reins.
The company was floated in 1978, and nine years later Bramall agreed his first takeover by Avis, collecting £45m for the family stake.
But retirement did not beckon then and in 1990 Bramall put £1.5m into his second car venture, called CD Bramall.
In January 2004, he sold the Harrogate-based operation to the much larger Pendragon in a £230m takeover, netting £76m for his stake.
He raised eyebrows in the car trade in April 2006 with his third foray by paying £56m to acquire a stake in Lookers, Britain’s second biggest quoted car dealership.
The move effectively scuppered rival Pendragon’s £245m bid for Lookers, which Bramall had opposed. That stake is now worth £46m.
Bramall, 74, also had another car dealership, Bramall & Jones, that was sold for around £24m in March 2010. Bramall’s proceeds should have been £18m.
We can also see another £34m of net assets in the 2009 accounts of Bramall Properties and Winterquay, two property and farming ventures.
In all, the Bramall family is easily worth around £132m after tax and reinvestment of sale proceeds.
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115. Julia Davey
£131m
Angel Group
2009: £131m (No change)
Julia Davey was an estate agent before she branched out into the renovation and sale of apartments. After 10 years of hard work, she built the Angel Group, a London-based property operation, which has started to move into government accommodation contracts and, in parallel, the acquisition of properties and developments.
Currently, the Angel Group is involved in major projects in London and other developments in Eastern Europe, Cyprus, and Israel. It is also building up a chain of smart boutique hotels and top level wedding venues.
The group made a £2.9m profit on £31.5m sales in 2008-09.
It has £64.3m net assets and, with other companies such as the £7m Angelic Interiors, Davey’s business assets should be worth more than £80m.
We add another £51m for her property and personal assets.
With a planning application for a landmark 42-storey tower in London Docklands, known as Number One, at an advanced stage, we value Davey, 53, at around £131m.
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117. Steve & Clive Boultbee Brooks
£130m
Boultbee
2009: £200m (-£70m)
Steve and Clive Boultbee Brooks sold off three Swedish shopping centres in June 2010 for £125m. The funds will be reinvested in central and northern Europe.
The brothers – Steve, 49, a mechanical engineer and intrepid polar explorer, and Clive, 47, a chartered surveyor – grew up on a farm in Staffordshire, though their father was a stockbroker.
They sold their cars in 1987 for £5,000 to take on the property world. They started by buying and redeveloping industrial space in Shoreditch, on the fringes of the City. In the 1990s, they developed office and industrial space in the Midlands. After narrowly surviving the property crash, they turned to retail.
It is in the Nordic region that their company, Boultbee, has done really well in recent years. In 2008, it sold Helsinki’s Kamppi shopping centre for around £390m. The brothers have more than 80 companies, the biggest being Boultbee Construction with £126m net assets in 2008. when it made a big loss of over £43m. Smaller companies add another £5m net assets.
The banking crisis in late 2008 forced the Boultbee Brooks to replace £80m of facilities previously provided by the failed Lehman Brothers. Cautiously, we value the pair at £130m, allowing for any debt in the business.
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117. Cyril Dennis & Family
£130m
Rumford Investments
2009: £130m (No change)
In March 2009, Dennis spent more than £23m acquiring the 403-bedroom Le Méridien Beach Plaza hotel in Monte Carlo.
In nearby Antibes, he is converting the former Le Provençal Hotel into 60 apartments after it had been left empty by its previous owner for 34 years.
Dennis, 66, has a good pedigree in shrewd property deals. He sold a 3.3 acre site on the Isle of Dogs for £47m in September 2006. Nine years previously, he bought the site for just £2m.
Dennis has also secured approval for a development at Peruvian Wharf in the London Docklands at the fourth attempt. He has owned the site, which was recently touted as a possible location for the UK’s first giant casino, since 1999. A £67m development in Liverpool was also completed in 2006 by Dennis.
He began his development work as the half owner of an Essex housebuilder, which he sold in 1987. After a spell advising the Berisford Group, he built up his own property business with a portfolio spread across the UK.
In 1994, Dennis sold 75% of the portfolio to Legal & General for £116m, netting a profit of £50m in the process.
Today, we can see around 50 small companies, including Rumford Investments, held by the Dennis family and trusts. They have around £50m net assets. With the developments in the pipeline and the profit from the Isle of Dogs sale, we keep the Dennis family at £130m.
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115. David Pearl
£131m
Structadene
2009: £147m (-£16m)
David Pearl left school at 15 and spent four years packing cardigans into boxes to earn his living. He switched to property on the advice of an estate agent friend and, after two days, decided he liked the business.
Last year, his Structadene business saw its profits rise from £4.5m to £23.6m thanks to a strategy of selling off assets. He became a frequent seller at auction and intends to reduce the size of the portfolio by as much as a third over the next five years to reduce Structadene’s £838m of debt.
The company’s net assets came in at £127m, down again on the previous year. We value Structadene on the net asset figure. Pearl, 65, owns it all.
We add £4m for his stakes in smaller companies such as the Good Vibes gym chain and his past salaries.
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117. John Dunsdon & Family
£130m
Coldunell
2009: £130m (No change)
Esher-based property company Coldunell saw its profits slump in 2008-09 from £5.8m to £2.8m on sales of £10.7m. Its net assets also fell from £125.2m to £112.2m.
The business is run by John Dunsdon, 58, and owned by his family and trusts. Dunsdon had a surveying background but learned more from his property dealer father, who founded Coldunell in 1959.
Dunsdon is renowned as one of the shrewdest operators in the property auctions market. He began his career attending auctions at the Fur Trade House in the City of London, the birthplace of modern auctions, before it moved to the Connaught Rooms in Bloomsbury in the early 1970s.
We value the company below its net assets at £100m in today’s climate, adding £30m for other assets.
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117. John Hindle & Family
£130m
Brookhouse Properties
2009: £90m (+£40m)
Brookhouse, a Sale-based industrial and residential developer, has worked on schemes from London Docklands to Glasgow.
It is run by veteran property man John Hindle, 76, and has been in business since 1932.
The company reports that it has a £240m property portfolio, net assets of £139m and a rent roll of £14m. But this is difficult to firm up as the parent company, Brookhouse Group, is owned by a Luxembourg-based trust.
Nevertheless, it made a £4.3m profit and showed nearly £82m net assets in 2009.
We assume it is owned by the Hindle family and, taking into account other company assets, we value the family on the £130m net asset figure given on the company website.
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121. Sir Richard Sutton & Family
£129m
Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates
2009: £115m (+£14m)
Profits at 73-year-old Sir Richard Sutton’s Settled Estates rose sharply in 2008-09 from £2.8m to £3.6m and sales were up slightly at £13.2m.
Sutton inherited the title from his father in 1981 and runs the property-to-farming group.
The Suttons have valuable acreage in Lincolnshire, Somerset, London’s Park Lane and the United States.
Sutton will also play a crucial role in Grimsby Town Football Club’s plans for a new £15m stadium as it will be built on land he currently owns.
We value the estate on its £123.6 net assets. adding £5m for past dividends and other assets. In 2008-09, the company gave the Conservative Party £2,800.
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122. Mathias & Miriam Kraus
£127m
Pall Mall Investments (London)
2009: £100m (+£27m)
Mathias and Miriam Kraus, both 68, own Pall Mall Investments (London), a North London-based property group, which made a £908,000 profit in 2008-09, and has net assets which fell from £155.4m to £125.6m.
But with the property downturn easing, we value the business on the net asset figure. We add £1.4m for past dividends to the Kraus family.
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123. John Seddon & Family
£126m
Seddon Group
2009: £85m (+£41m)
Seddon Property Services landed a £19.5m maintenance contract for a social housing provider in February 2010.
This explains why the company is on a roll, doubling its turnover and taking on 400 more staff since 2004.
It is part of the Cheshire-based Seddon Group which was founded in 1897 by two Lancashire bricklayers.
The modern Seddon Group was created in 1957 and it is now run by the third and fourth generations of the family.
It is also involved in property development and golf club management, while Inspired Developments is the group’s regeneration division.
The first non-family member now chairs the company but John Seddon, 75, is here as the senior family member representing the family and trusts which own the company.
In 2009, the Seddon Group made an £8m profit on £253m sales. We value the company on its £85m net assets figure.
The Seddon family also own Seddon Properties, which showed £41.5m net assets and turned in £2.2m profit on £2.8m sales in 2009.
With other assets, the wider Seddon family should easily be worth £126m.
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124. Michael & Robert Slowe
£125m
J Leon
2009: £95m (+£30m)
Cousins Michael, 75, and Robert Slowe, 73, are directors of J Leon, a family-owned property investment and holding company.
Based in London, the company and family are very low key. In 2009-10, the firm made a £4.3m profit on £6.7m sales and showed record net assets of £177m.
With low borrowings and a strong balance sheet, the company is easily worth £120m in today’s market.
We add £5m for dividends and other assets to the wider Slowe family.
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125. Michael Shanly
£122m
Michael Shanly
2009: £82m (+£40m)
In January 2010, the Michael Shanly Charitable Trust stepped in to ensure that an outdoor activities centre costing £3m could be developed in Marlow, the Thames-side town.
The charity also helped the local Age Concern charity with a new kitchen.
The Thames Valley and Buckinghamshire is fertile territory for Shanly, 64, who founded the upmarket Michael Shanly housebuilding operation in 1970.
He chairs and owns at least 13 significant but separate building or development companies.
His main operation is Sorbon Investments, which made a £3.6m profit on £13.1m sales in 2008. It has £60.8m net assets.
But other Shanly companies, including Sorbon Homes, add around £79m further net assets in 2008.
We value the businesses slightly below the total net asset figure at £110m, and add £12m for Shanly’s past salaries and other assets.
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126. Andrew Creighton
£120m
William Ewart Properties
2009: £90m (+£30m)
A former plumber, Andrew Creighton has become one of Northern Ireland’s leading developers, with a 50% stake in William Ewart Properties.
With partner Frank Boyd, a former electrician, Creighton came to prominence in 2002 through one of the biggest property deals in Belfast’s history.
The pair spent £90m buying out the Northern Ireland property holdings of Dublin-based Dunloe Ewart, gaining around 12 properties, including Lanyon Place, the Howden Sirocco site, Windsor House, and three London-based properties, along with an area around Cathedral Way which has been touted as a new retail extension.
This formed the basis of William Ewart which, in 2008, showed £232.4m net assets and a £3.8m profit.
The company began marketing its three London shopping centres for £300m earlier this year and has sold one – next to Victoria Station – to Network Rail for £95m.
We can see other companies owned by Creighton, including Hazelhaw Properties with £1.8m net assets in 2009, and Dorgan Properties with £1.1m net assets. In all, more than £125m of net assets are attributable to him.
But cautiously, we value Creighton, 49, at £120m in today’s climate.
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126. David Roberts
£120m
Edinburgh House Estates
2009: £105m (+£15m)
David Roberts sold the majority of his UK portfolio in 2004 and headed to Germany. Aside from property, Roberts is best known as the man behind the philanthropic David Roberts Art Foundation in London.
A former chief executive of Bourne End Properties, he now runs Edinburgh House Estates which, despite its name, is a London-based property operation. Its parent, Edinburgh House Estates (Holdings), made a £1.3m profit on turnover of £52.9m in 2008, when its net assets fell from £165m to £141.2m. Roberts has a near 78% stake worth £110m in the current climate.
His art collection and other assets, such as a stake in Bawtry Properties, should take Roberts, 54, to £120m easily.
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126. Fawn & India Rose James & Family
£120m
Soho Estates
2009: £120m (No change)
Fawn James inherited the bulk of the property fortune owned by her grandfather, Paul Raymond, who started out on his path to riches through top-shelf magazines and Soho clip joints.
Raymond’s property business grew as he moved into upmarket Kensington and Notting Hill, but he never failed to buy up any building in Soho that came on the market.
Soho Estates Holdings, the main Raymond company, made £16m profit on £26.3m sales in 2008. It has £372.8m net assets.
In addition, there are £27.3m net assets in the magazine business, Paul Raymond Publications.
Raymond was always determined that Fawn and India Rose James, the daughters of his late daughter Debbie, would inherit his estate. His will left £75m to his granddaughters.
But with the huge asset base in Soho, most commentators think there is a lot more tucked away for the family.
Cautiously, however, we still value the granddaughters and family at £120m until we can see more.
Fawn, 24, having finished a degree in social anthropology at St Andrews University, became a director of the Raymond companies in 2007, but India Rose is still too young to join the business.
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126. Gerard Versteegh & Family
£120m
Gerard Versteegh Holdings
2009: £120m (No change)
Gerard Versteegh has been involved in the London property market since his mid-20s.
The 50-year-old low-key Swede started managing properties for Scandinavian companies in the UK through his London-based property consultancy, Commercial Estates Management.
Today, we can see some asset-rich companies where he is a director, led by Gestrix, which showed £191m net assets in 2006.
Gestrix showed only modified accounts in 2007, but £12.7m profit. It also shows only modified accounts now, but its parent had £4m assets in 2009.
Another dissolved Versteegh company – Anglo Scandanavian Estates – showed more than £95m net assets in 2006.
In the current climate, we keep the Versteegh family at around £120m.
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130. Elliott Bernerd
£119m
Chelsfield
2009: £219m (-£100m)
Chelsfield Partners, the property company of Elliott Bernerd and another property veteran, Sir Stuart Lipton, lost £101.3m in 2008. Chelsfield, with a raft of heavyweight backers, also disclosed that at 31 December 2008 it was in breach of certain financial covenants on £155.7m of loans.
But the slight improvement in the property world since the accounts were audited in September 2009 has eased the pressure and the loans do not need to be repaid immediately. It was the heavyweight backing of Qatar which enabled Elliott Bernerd, 65, to beat off competition to land the American embassy site in London’s Grosvenor Square in early 2009. When the Americans leave for a new embassy south of the river, the old site will be redeveloped in a £500m scheme.
In March, Chelsfield teamed up with London & Regional to buy a 50% stake in Elizabeth House in SE1 for £85m, and in June it worked with Olayan Group to buy £580m of Knightbridge assets. Bernerd, who has been fighting cancer, previously ran another Chelsfield operation, which he founded in 1986, floated on the stock market in 1993 and then took private in May 2004, pocketing £45m from selling part of his stake. He reinvested the rest, worth around £56m, in the company. Five months later, Bernerd sold the business, turning his £56m into £82m. He kept the rights to the name Chelsfield and naturally started again.
Bernerd also has the separate Chelsfield Investments International, which is involved in large projects in Italy and Gibraltar. In December 2005, he also took a one-third stake in a £400m European property fund and acquired a minority stake in 47 cinemas in Poland.
But in the current climate and after the hefty losses at Chelsfield Partners, we cut Bernerd back to £120m, lopping off a further £1m for his generous donation to the Saving Faces charity.
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130. Jeff Smith
£119m
Proudreed
2009: £65m (+£54m)
Smith’s main wealth is in a property company, Proudreed, which he owns jointly with Caspar Macdonald-Hall.
The firm made £12.8m profit on £31.8m sales in 2009 and has more than £130m net assets. Smith’s stake there should be worth £65m.
We add £5m for other assets such as his Hampshire stud farm and string of racehorses.
Smith also had a £24m stake in AIM engineering, which makes aircraft seats and safety systems. Profits soared to £15.1m in 2009. AIM was subject to a management buy-out in June 2010. In all, 64-year-old Smith is worth £119m.
132 £118m
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131. Bill Gredley & Family
Unex Corporation
2009: £95m (+£23m)
Bill Gredley is well liked by the pensioners in his neck of Suffolk. Every Christmas for the past seven years, he has treated 700 pensioners to a three-course lunch. He also takes several hundred to Great Yarmouth on an annual summer day.
But it is racing where he has made his name in the wider world. His silks – yellow, black and yellow striped sleeves, white cap – are among the most familiar on the turf, and were carried to victoryin both the Oaks and St Leger by his famous horse User Friendly.
Gredley, 77, is also a shrewd property developer. His Unex Group operation showed a £10.6m loss in 2008-09 when its net assets fell from £116.9m to £102.7m. We value the company, owned by Gredley and his family trusts, on the net assets.
Gredley’s racing interests, a £13m dividend in 2002-03 and smaller companies we can see with net assets of £2m, take him and his family to around £118m after tax.
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132. Anthony Khalastchi & Family
£118m
Flodrive Holdings
2009: £105m (+£13m)
Property investor Tony Khalastchi sold two DIY store sites in February 2010 for a combined total of £17.88m.
In October 2009, he sold eight properties at auction – most of which were in London – at prices he says he could not have fetched two years ago. “In all my years in property I have never seen anything like this,” he said.
“The last few weeks have been crazy. I can get more than my money back on the well-let, well-located London properties that I bought at auction at the height of the market.”
And in July it was revealed that Khalastchi, 49, was bidding to buy Joseph Ackerman’s £90m New York portfolio of banks and offices. His family’s two property groups, Flodrive and Strandpark Properties, showed £103.4m net assets in their 2008-09 accounts.
In December 2003, Khalastchi, along with the low-key Pears family, bought the 252-strong Punch Pubs’ portfolio for £57m. In October 2004, they sold 38 of the pubs, netting £15.2m.
We value the businesses at the net asset figure, adding £15m for other Khalastchi family assets.
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132. David Kirch
£118m
Channel Hotels & Properties
2009: £118m (No change)
Jersey-based property investor David Kirch has often shown a good sense of timing. Early in 2008 he sold a portfolio of properties to Irish investors for £48m.
In 2006 he was reputed to have made £2m in two months dealing in the shares of UK Coal. It shows that as a pensioner himself, Kirch has not retired from what he likes best – investing in companies.
We did see £16.5m-worth of stakes in quoted companies held by his company, Channel Hotels & Properties, but these are no longer recorded, which may mean a sale. But that is just the tip of the Kirch fortune.
In 2004, he took over Property Acquisition & Management, an investment trust with a £200m property portfolio, in a £69.5m deal. Such moves are typical for the shrewd Kirch, who has a nose for an undervalued asset.
He made his fortune in London residential property in the 1960s, selling his last properties in 1988 for £30m. We have not seen any accounts recently but after that deal, the net assets rose to nearly £85m.
Kirch has been involved in a bewildering array of investments and takeovers, ranging from leisure to health care. But even with recent deal-making and asset sales, 74-year-old Kirch cannot be immune from the steep fall in asset values. As a result, we keep him at £120m.
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132. Stuart Monk & Family
£118m
Jomast
2009: £99m (+£19m)
Stockton-based Jomast saw its profits come in at £3.9m on £13m sales in 2008-09 when its net assets rose from £116.5m to £121.1m.
The company, run by Stuart Monk, 61, a leading local developer, recently submitted a planning application to Stockton Council to bring back the famous Globe Theatre as a top live performance and entertainment venue with an audience capacity of 2,500.
It is already working hard to transform the waterfront at Hartlepool Marina after a £100m development was given the green light in June 2008.
Planning permission has been granted on plans submitted by Jomast to redevelop a 4.65 hectare site at Jackson Dock. Trincomalee Wharf will include a luxury four-star hotel, restaurants, shops, office accommodation and waterside apartments.
The prestigious 470,000 sq ft scheme will link the marina with the town centre and is seen by many as the final piece of the jigsaw for Hartlepool Marina.
Jomast is also focusing on the Newcastle office market with plans for a 30,000 sq ft development to the north of the city centre. We value Jomast slightly below the reported net assets at £115m. Monk and his family trusts own it all. We add another £3m for other assets and stakes in separate companies, including Bandoffice.
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136. Sir Tom Farmer
£115m
Morston Assets
2009: £110m (+£5m)
Sir Tom Farmer recently made £8.5m by selling a stake in KBC Holdings, a managed office business. He is best known in Scotland for owning 90% of Hibs, the Edinburgh football team, but it is tyres that made Farmer his first fortune. He founded the Kwik Fit chain of garages in 1971, later selling the company to Ford in 1999 for £1bn.
Farmer netted £78m for his stake. Yet he was savvy enough to retain the freeholds on many Kwik Fit properties, generating £1m a year in rents. Farmer has not neglected business and recently sold choice Edinburgh properties for £2.4m.
He cast a slide rule over UK Coal, before abandoning plans for a bid. Meanwhile, his development activities continue apace. In February 2009, he bought a Newcastle business park for a cut-price £20.25m.
We can see half a dozen small property companies controlled by Farmer or his trusts with around £17.5m of net assets. In the current climate, Farmer, 70, should now be worth £115m after tax.
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136. Heinrich Feldman & Family
£115m
Inremco 26
2009: £105m (+£10m)
Feldman is a low-key London property owner and trader with more than 50 directorships to his name. His main holding company is Inremco 26, which was incorporated in 1983. It made a £2.7m profit on £17.2m sales in 2008-09 when its net assets were £107m. We can also see Feldman stakes in a host of smaller property firms worth more than £9m.
With other assets, we reckon Feldman, 75, is easily worth £115m in today’s climate.
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138. Jim McGettigan
£114m
McGettigan
2009: £195m (-£81m)
Jim McGettigan, the veteran Donegal hotelier, opened an £80m hotel in Dubai in May. The Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers hotel and apartment complex has more than 200 bedrooms and 250 flats. McGettigan owns the Bonnington Group in London and property interests via his McGettigan company in Dublin.
He sold The Parliament Hotel in Dublin for around £16m and the Bonnington Hotel in London for £74m.
McGettigan started his career as a first-class waiter on the Queen Elizabeth. His business empire began when he returned from London with wife Patsy in 1964 and purchased a pub on Dublin’s Queen Street. From that one pub he has built the McGettigan Group, which includes Olten Investments and Regan Developments, and the £112m Regency Hotel Group.
In 2005, McGettigan trumped retail giants Tesco among others to purchase the art deco former Gillette headquarters in west London. The Bonnington Group went from a £21m profit to a £5.8m loss in 2009 and showed £21.4m net assets.
In all, McGettigan, 73, should be worth £114m after tax in today’s difficult market.
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139. Eric Gadsden
£113m
WE Black
2009: £113m (No change)
Eric Gadsden’s Chesham-based company, WE Black, went from a £16m profit in 2007 to a £4.5m loss on £15.9m sales in 2008. The developer still has a rock-solid balance sheet, though its net assets fell £5m to £90.5m. It should be worth £70m in today’s difficult climate.
Gadsden, as owner, took little out of the company in either dividends or salaries. He has past stakes or current ones in quoted companies worth around £4m, including a £3.5m holding in Michelmersh Brick, a quoted brick maker he chairs.
There are another £41m of net assets in Three Rivers Property Investments and Church Cottage Investments. With his racing interests added, Gadsden, 65, should be worth at least £113m in this difficult market.
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140. Peter Dawson & Family
£112m
Consolidated Property Wilmslow
2009: £78m (+£34m)
Property developer Peter Dawson runs Consolidated Property Wilmslow , an Alderley Edge developer. Consolidated saw its net assets rise from £49.6m to £50.9m in 2008-09.
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, which showed £58.5m net assets in the same period.
It is worth its net assets and is owned by the Jensal Settlement. Dawson, 58, was the settler and trustee of this trust. As a result, we assume that the Dawson family is the ultimate beneficiary. Taking into account other assets, we value the family at £112m.
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140. Jonathan Hitchins & Family
£112m
Robert Hitchins
2009: £90m (+£22m)
A new Cheltenham Office Park creating 1,000 jobs is planned by the Robert Hitchins Group. The Cheltenham-based developer is building business parks, new villages and other developments in Wales and the South West.
But it is not immune from the downturn and, in 2008-09, profits at the Robert Hitchins Group fell from £8.2m to £1.4m on sales which were also down £12m at £26.4m.
Started more than 45 years ago by the late Robert Hitchins, who bought up large tracts of Gloucestershire very cheaply after the second world war, the company has developed more than 14,000 houses and over 1,500,000 sq ft of commercial property.
It has nearly £87m net assets and a strong balance sheet but, in the current climate, we value it at that level.
We add another £25m after tax to the Hitchins family for other assets, including a £40m dividend paid out in 2003-04.
142 £110m
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141. William Ainscough & Family
Langtree Group
2009: £120m (-£10m)
Bill Ainscough’s Langtree Group recently invited tenders for its £40m stadium project with St Helens Rugby League Club and Tesco, due for completion in early 2011. In 1973, he founded the Wainhomes housebuilding business.
After merging with two other builders in 1989, he floated the enlarged group five years later. Fed up with stock market indifference to the company, Ainscough took Wainhomes private in 1999. Within two years, he had sold the company, netting £44m for his stake. His family owned most of Langtree Group with nearly £71m of net assets in 2008-09.
It now owns and manages 4m sq ft of commercial property accommodating more than 800 tenants. The portfolio produces a rental income of around £15m a year.
But his housing ambitions have not ended. Ainscough, 62, bought the old Wain Homes south western operation and the renamed Wain Group, which operates in the South West. It made a £5.3m loss on £61m sales in 2008-09.
Wain Group has £29m assets and is worth that sum.
With a private jet, a yacht and a flotilla of classic cars, Ainscough and his family is worth at least £110m.
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142. £110m
Martin Birrane
Peer Group
2009: £109m (+£1m)
Martin Birrane is keen to get his Lola racing car operation on the grid for Formula One. He was beaten to a slot for the 2010 season but is looking to get Lola back into the sport as a team for the first time since 1997.
It was after that year’s disastrous campaign that Birrane bought Lola from the receiver. Lola Group made an £821,000 loss on £21.4m sales in 2008-09 from its activities making chassis for racing cars.
The company is developing new markets and diversifying into different industries.
It now supplies drone aircraft, space vehicle parts, antennae, radar and communication systems, aircraft parts, and structures for powerboats and sailing yachts.
As a result, Lola now has a strong order book and the financial performance is improving.
An Irish property magnate from Co Mayo, Birrane started dealing in property in the 1960s through his Peer Group.
In 2008-09, its net assets fell sharply from £97.9m to £70.5m, and we value Peer at £90m in this climate.
Birrane, 75, also owns the Mondello Park racing track in Co Kildare which, after significant investment, hosts international race meetings. With other interests, including Lola, Birrane should be worth at least £110m.
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142 £110m
Robert Bourne & Sally Green
Happybadge Projects
2009: £110m (No change)
Property entrepreneur Robert Bourne made his first fortune with the Local London property group, which was floated on the stock market in 1986 worth £6m.
Three years later, it was sold for £110m in a takeover. The Bourne family made £16m.
Since then Bourne, 60, has built up and sold stakes in companies such as Ex-Lands and Clubhaus.
He was a bidder for the London Dome and now owns Happybadge Projects. Its net assets came in at £61.6m in 2009, when it made a £1.4m profit.
Bourne has a £10m flat in Mayfair which he bought as an investment in 2002. His Bourne Capital investment operation also sold a luxury Park Lane block for £100m in 2006.
His wife, Sally Green, 56, is chief executive of Old Vic Productions and co-producer of Billy Elliot The Musical.
We value Happybadge at £63m and add £47m for other Bourne and Green assets.
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142 £110m
Robin Clark & Family
Taylor Clark
2009: £86m (+£24m)
Taylor Clark, the London-based property, farming, hotels and investment group, turned in a loss of £11.5m on £13.6m sales in 2008-09.
The effects of the economic crisis would have been much worse on the group but for its strong cash reserves and the defensive nature of its investments.
The business is largely owned by the Clark family led by Robin Clark, the 72-year-old son of a prominent 1960s property developer.
We value it on its its £153.4m net assets.
The Underwood Trust, a charity, has a 19.5% stake, which leaves the Clark family’s stake worth around £110m.
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142 £110m
Eric Grove
Catesby
2009: £108m (+£2m)
Eric Grove’s Catesby Property Group is developing Firstpoint – a £200m business and retail park near the M18 in Doncaster.
Catesby specialises in such brownfield sites and had around £15m of net assets in 2007 when it turned in a useful £9m profit on £40.4m of sales. The company is also developing a £29m student housing-led mixed use scheme in Camden Lock, NW1.
The son of a West Midlands blacksmith, Grove started Canberra, a Midlands housebuilder in 1968, specialising in high-quality houses. He sold the business to Alfred McAlpine in 1988 mainly for McAlpine shares, which in turn netted him £40m.
He has become a serious property developer with retail parks in the Midlands, residential developments in Jersey and a stake in a property investment operation.
Recently, he has sold well over 1.2m sq ft of warehousing and distribution centres. In the current market, Catesby should be worth £30m. With other stakes, cash and assets, Grove, 80, is worth around £110m today.
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142 £110m
Jack Morris & Family
Business Design Centre
2009: £95m (+£15m)
In 2008-09, the Business Design Centre Group made a record £7.7m profit on £19.9m sales. Its net assets fell to £95.5m and we value the business on that figure.
Jack Morris’s late father, Sam, was originally an “oyster-opener” in a City fish restaurant, but later built his business, City Industrial, into a leading shopfitting group in Britain and worldwide.
Sam Morris’s shrewd move came in 1981 when he rescued the old Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington and turned the huge derelict “Aggie” into the Business Design Centre at a cost of £12m.
The Morris family also owned Earls Court and Olympia which they sold in 2004, making around £25m from the sale after debt had been stripped out.
In all, after allowing for tax on that deal, the wider Morris family should be worth £110m.
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148 £107m
Simon Karimzadeh & Family
Eskar International
2009: £107m (No change)
In October 2006, Simon Karimzadeh snapped up a £1.13bn European property portfolio sold by a Swiss hedge fund. Karimzadeh’s late father started Eskar International, a London-based property trading-to-processing group, more than 40 years ago.
Its activities spanned leather tanneries in the Middle and Far East, and dried fruit and nut processing plants, as well as trade in iron and steel in the 1970s and 1980s.
Since then, it has focused on property.
Karimzadeh, 48, was in the news in the property pages in 2004 over his efforts to buy Grade I Listed Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire for £3.1m.
He was gazumped by the government in the shape of the culture department.
The Karimzadeh family owns all of Eskar, which showed nearly £286m net assets in 2008-09. We still value Eskar at £100m, adding £7m for other assets to the Karimzadeh family.
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149 £105m
Frank Burke & Family
BDL
2009: £105m (No change)
Cabretta Holdings, a London-based construction company, made £1.4m profit on £46.4m sales in 2009.
It has £10.1m of net assets and is the parent for the BDL Group, run by 62-year-old Irishman Frank Burke.
Burke’s family also owns Farmglade, a property company with around £21m net assets in 2009. In this climate, we cut Burke back to £105m.
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150 £104m
Albert Hay & Family
Capital & City
2009: £92m (+£12m)
Chartered surveyor, Albert Hay, 63, and his family own the Mayfair Property Group, Capital & City PLC, plus 57.5% of its sister group Capital & City Properties.
Earlier this year, Capital & City found a keen buyer for a block on Charlotte Street.
The building, which includes three restaurants, was sold to Standard Life Investments in March for £19.1m, a 5.6% yield.
Capital & City also had three other West End buildings on the market.
Three of the Hay family’s companies had £92.4m net assets in 2009. The family stake is worth £64m in the current climate. Other assets and property investments add another £40m, taking the Hay family to around £104m.
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151 £103m
Rashid & Aziz Tayub
Crown Crest
New entry
The Tayub family owns the Crown Crest distribution and property operation based in Leicester. It was started in 1977 by Rashid Tayub after the family came to Leicester from Malawi, East Africa. It is now run by his brother, Aziz, the managing director.
The three separate Tayub companies we can see, led by Crown Crest Group, made a total of nearly £17m profit on £257.6m sales in 2008-09. With nearly £72m net assets, they are worth perhaps £100m in today’s climate.
Collectively, we value the family, led by Aziz, 55, and Rashid, 62, at £103m with past salaries and other assets, as the Tayubs take little out of the businesses.
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152 £100m
Anton Bilton & Family
Raven
2009: £90m (+£10m)
Raven Russia, the property group co-founded by deputy chairman Anton Bilton, floated on AIM in 2005 after raising £153m. In August, it moved to the main market to raise its profile.
It has a completed portfolio of around 11m sq ft of warehouses in Russia, which were valued at the end of last year at $879m. Raven Russia’s market value is now around £266m. In June 2009, the company swallowed its former parent company, Raven Mount.
Bilton, 46, had an £11m stake in Raven Mount, while his Raven Russia stake is now worth around £30m. Property is in Bilton’s blood. He is the grandson of the late Percy Bilton, whose own quoted property group was taken over by rival Slough Estates in November 1998 for £270m.
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 Anton Bilton’s own assets, including a stake in Chelsea’s KX Gym, the Bilton family is worth £100m.
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152 £100m
Simon Clarke & Family
St Modwen
2009: £120m (-£20m)
Property group St Modwen, which has started work for the proposed £750m development of the old Rover site in Birmingham, suffered a £101.6m loss in the year to November 2009 as it cut the value of its properties.
St Modwen has developed a reputation as a regeneration specialist. It was co-founded by Sir Stan Clarke, who died in 2004. He left £138.9m in his will. His son Simon, 45, sits on the St Modwen board looking after the Clarke family interests. The family stake is now worth £59m.
The family also owned a stake in Northern Racing, the biggest racecourse owner after the Jockey Club. It was sold in May 2007 to the Reuben brothers for £65.9m.
Past sale proceeds and other assets add £35m, taking the family to £100m.
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152 £100m
Sir John Ritblat & Family
British Land
2009: £90m (+£10m)
The Ritblat family’s Delancey property operation has been snapping up distressed assets of late. Banks are handing over huge swathes of property to Delancey to manage, drawing on Sir John Ritblat’s expertise in the property market.
He was chairman of British Land from 1970 to 2006, when he retired. But Ritblat’s retirement lasted just two weeks and he resurfaced in early January 2007 when he joined forces with younger son Jamie, to spearhead a £2.6bn property investment fund.
Ritblat, 75, sold most of his stake in British Land for £57m just before he retired, but retained a £10m stake. Delancey made a £9.3m profit on £24m sales in 2008-09. The Ritblats should easily be worth £100m.
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152 £100m
Andrew Rosenfeld
Minerva
2009: £100m (No change)
Andrew Rosenfeld, the former chief executive of the quoted property group Minerva, keeps a low profile from his Geneva base where he has set up Air Capital – AIR are his initials – funded initially by his own £100m fortune. The fund is investing in distressed property.
Rosenfeld, 48, has devoted much of his time to charitable works. We value him on the £100m he has for investments.
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156 £95m
Sir David Garrard
Minerva
2009: £95m (No change)
Sir David Garrard, the son of an upholsterer from Stamford Hill, went into property after leaving school at 16. In 1955 he joined an estate agency and never looked back.
He rose to prominence in the late 1980s at a company called Land Investors, which was sold to the Berger family for around £180m.
With Andrew Rosenfeld he launched Minerva, which floated on the stock market in 1996. It became a stock market star with big developments in the City and Croydon.
In March 2005, Garrard, 71, stood down as chairman and left the business. His family trusts sold £37m worth of shares at the time. Other assets take him to around £95m.
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156 £95m
Tony Pidgley
Berkeley
New entry
Housebuilder Berkeley is riding the recession in pretty good shape. But in spite of a strong balance sheet, cost-cutting and a return to buying land for future sales, the Cobham-based operation has not been immune from what chairman Tony Pidgley describes as the “most turbulent market ever”. It is valued at just over £1.1bn, less than half its value in mid-2007.
Pidgley, 63, 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.
The former Barnado’s boy has a stake in Berkeley now worth £57m. He sold £21m worth of shares in 2009. But previous salaries, dividends and his share of bonuses take him to £95m.
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156 £95m
Dick Watson & Family
Keepmoat
2009: £85m (+£10m)
Regeneration specialist Keepmoat was sold in 2007 to a management team in a £783m deal. Scots-born Dick Watson, 68, who was a director, had an 18.26% stake.
Allowing for any tax on the sale proceeds, we value Watson’s stake at £90m. Past dividends take the Watson family to £95m.
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159 £93m
Patrick Doherty & Family
Harcourt Developments
2009: £200m (-£107m)
Donegal developer Patrick Doherty’s most high-profile work is the £700m redevelopment of the Harland & Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic was built.
Doherty has given most of Harcourt to his children. In 2008, it lost £20.9m, but it has nearly £128m net assets.
Doherty, 68, also has hotel, transport and property assets in the Caribbean. He is worth around £93m.
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160 £90m
John Hitchcox
Yoo
New entry
The son of an architect who also kept a smallholding in Sussex, John Hitchcox is now a leading property entrepreneur.
He began buying, renovating and selling homes in the UK in the early 1980s. He co-founded Manhattan Loft Corporation in the 1990s, selling out to partner Harry Handelsman. He then formed a development and design group called Yoo with designer Phillipe Stark in 1999.
Hitchcox, 49, owns about two-thirds of the company, which is working on about £3bn of developments in locations ranging from New York and Sydney to Buenos Aires and Hong Kong.
Before the recession the business was worth around £170m but its value fell and in 2008, with its design business alone valued at £64m. That is around half the overall business which should be worth in total around £120m. Hitchcox also has £9.5m of personal property assets and a stake in a London estate agency. In all, we reckon Hitchcox is worth £90m.
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160 £90m
Ray Horney
Real Estate Opportunities
2009: £80m (+£10m)
Real Estate Opportunities is planning to spin off its Battersea power station site in London and float it as a separate listed business.
The idea behind the proposed move is to attract more investors to the Battersea project by not having the asset directly linked with REO’s distressed Irish property portfolio.
REO bought the iconic 30-acre site for €595m at the end of 2006 and, last year, lodged the largest ever multi-purpose planning application for retail, leisure, business and residential use in London’s history.
REO is chaired by 74-year-old Ray Horney, whose early career was renting washing machines. He later moved into white goods retailing and sold his business for £21m in 1985. Five years later, Horney took a stake in St James Beach Hotels. In 1993, he made another £27m when it was sold.
In addition, Horney has £2m-worth of share stakes in quoted property companies, including China Real Estate and Nordic Land. We value him at around £90m.
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160 £90m
Patrick Kelly
Kelland Homes
New entry
Patrick Kelly and fellow Irish developer Sean Mulryan own a group called Markland Holdings which owns property in Ireland, the UK , the US , the Czech Republic , Hungary and Germany. It had more than £91m net assets in 2008.
Kelly, 68, also owns half of Dublin housebuilder Kelland Homes, which showed more than £52m net assets in 2008. Other interests include Rockbriar, another housebuilder, and a stake in Choice Hotels, Ireland’s largest hotel group.
Despite the turmoil of the Irish housing market, Kelly’s wide assets base should give him a £90m valuation.
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160 £90m
The Marquess of Northampton
The Canonbury Academy
New entry
The Marquess of Northampton’s Tandridge and Chesham Estates in Surrey are under offer for £25m. The sale will be a handy windfall for Northampton, who lives quietly these days at Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire, one of his two main Midland estates which span 25,000 acres.
His London estate around Canonbury has several buildings including the old Tower Theatre and the Canonbury Academy, which showed £1.8m net assets in 2008-09. With the likely £25m sale proceeds, we value Northampton, 64, at £90m.
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160 £90m
Lord Rana & Family
Andras House
New entry
Rana’s Andras House property-to-hotels group is benefiting from the current peace settlement in Northern Ireland.
The group, owned by the Rana family, made £1.7m profit on £15m sales in 2008-09. Its net assets came in at just under £80m. We value the business at around £70m in the current climate.
We add another £20m for private assets, property and other businesses such as the Ashoka Restaurant and Belfast Plaza.
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160 £90m
The Duke of Roxburghe
Sunlaws Development
2009: £80m (+£10m)
The Duke of Roxburghe, 56, has been faced with frustrating delays to a wind farm scheme on his land and local protests against the project, which has yet to win planning consent.
One paper reckoned that Roxburghe could make around £14m from the project over the next 25 years. It is a sign of how active the duke, who is fighting throat cancer, has become on the business front.
His company, Roxburghe Estates, is planning a joint venture to turn his Roxburghe Hotel into a 5-star resort. The five-year project will require £20m investment. Aside from his land and racing interests are valuable fishing rights. Sunlaws Development Co had £772,000 net assets in 2008-09.
Roxburghe also has stakes in golf, property and racing companies. In all, with land values increasing, we raise him to £90m.
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166 £89m
John Brooksbank
Blackshaw
2009: £72m (+£17m)
Brooksbank’s current property portfolio consists of residential houses, retail commercial and industrial property, hotels, pubs, caravan parks, marinas, farms and a golf course. We can see £27.3m of net assets in the 2009 accounts of Blackshaw Holdings, one of Brooksbank’s main companies, and a further £9.5m of net assets in other companies, including ADW Properties. In all, his business assets are worth £81m.
We add £8m to 54-year-old Brooksbank for other assets.
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167 £85m
Con Folkes & Family
Folkes
2009: £85m (No change)
Folkes Holdings, one of the largest private property groups in the Midlands, recovered in 2009, turning a £12.5m loss into a £3.7m profit on £28m sales.
The family-owned operation can trace its roots back to 1697 as a blacksmith making swords and chain mail.
It is run by Con Folkes, 57, who in 1981 became the then youngest chairman of a quoted company. It was taken private in 2002. With £53.3m net assets, it should be worth £55m. We add £30m for other assets to the Folkes family.
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167 £85m
Edward Lonergan
Deramore
2009: £65m (+£20m)
Edward Lonergan’s Deramore saw its profits fall from £20.7m to £9.7m in 2008-09, but with net assets of more than £88m, Deramore would easily be worth £80m in today’s market.
He also has £3.5m of assets in two other property companies, Lochinver and Deramore (L). We value Lonergan, 60, at £85m.
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167 £85m
Sir John Mactaggart & Family
Mactaggart Heritable
2009: £70m (+£15m)
Mactaggart Heritable, the Glasgow-based property group, saw its net assets fall slightly in 2009 to £78.5m. But it reduced its losses sharply from £6.3m to £0.6m.
Mactaggart Heritable owns a string of high-priced commercial properties, mostly in London and New York.
We value the business at £75m in the current climate, adding £10m for past dividends to the MacTaggart family.
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170 £82m
Bill Morris & Family
Morris & Co (Shrewsbury)
2009: £65m (+£17m)
Five generations of Morris family members have developed a business with interests in property, supermarkets and care homes.
Bill Morris, 72, the current boss, runs an operation which made £692,000 profit on £23.9m sales in 2008-09. It has nearly £83m of net assets.
We value the business at £80m in this climate. The Morris family take little out of the company and we value them at £82m.
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171 £81m
John Chamberlain & Family
Chamberlain
2009: £78m (+£3m)
Headed by John Chamberlain, 66, the Chamberlain Group has a diverse property portfolio. The family owns 99% of the shares in the business, which had £72.1m net assets at the end of 2009.
There is another £1.3m for the separate Home Counties Investments operation. With personal assets of £8m added, the Chamberlain family is worth around £81m.
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172 £80m
Kip Bertram & Family
Rysa Lodge Residential Properties
2009: £70m (+£10m)
Kip Bertram started Bertram Books in a disused Norwich chicken shed. It became the UK’s largest independent book wholesaler. In 1999, the business merged with Cypher, a public library supplier, in a £54m deal.
The move effectively valued the Bertram family stake at £35m.
Kip Bertram, 66, is no longer in the book trade, having moved into property development, particularly in London.
As a result, the family’s asset wealth is now around £80m.
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172 £80m
Bakir Cola & Family
Cola Holdings
2009: £80m (No change)
In 2009, Iraqi-born Bakir Cola spent £30m buying a building adjacent to his Westbury Hotel in London’s upmarket Mayfair.
Property experts reckon that Cola bought Washington House to extend the 5-star Westbury, the only hotel that fronts onto Bond Street.
It reopened in 2008 after a £25m refurbishment. Cola, 68, bought the 246-room hotel in 1999 for around £90m. He also has the 550-room Kensington Close Hotel.
Cola runs and owns Cola Holdings, which made £3.7m profit on £43.5m turnover in the year to September 2009. It has £28.8m net assets. Cola took a £48m dividend in 2006.
Proceeds from the £50m sale of the Harrington Hall hotel to Spanish hotel giant NH Hotels should take Cola to £80m.
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172 £80m
Danny Desmond
Bride Hall
2009: £78m (+£2m)
Danny Desmond, 70, started the Bride Hall property group in 1984 and sold 50% of the company to Great Portland Estates for £10m in 1987. He bought that stake back in the 1992 recession for a much lower figure.
Until late in 2004, he owned all of Bride Hall, but sold a 25% stake to the quoted Warner Estates for an undisclosed sum. Bride Hall is active in building a new Lichfield retail park.
Bride Hall Holdings and other Desmond firms have more than £12m net assets between them. We value Desmond at £80m.
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172 £80m
Peter Gadsby
Ark Capital
2009: £65m (+£15m)
Gadsby, a Midlands developer, is best known for leading a rescue consortium which took over Derby County Football Club in 2006, investing £28m in securing its future. However, he made his fortune in housebuilding originally.
Gadsby, 62, sold his 77% stake in Birch, the Derby-based property and construction group, to Edinburgh-based Miller Group in 2000 for a reported £35m. He now has various property interests worth at least £35m.
His main holding company, Ark Capital, showed £6.5m net assets in 2008-09, with cash balances in excess of £20m.
Other investments and private property take Gadsby to £80m.
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172 £80m
Nicholas & Peter Gould
Regis
New entry
Brothers Nicholas, 52, and Peter Gould, 51, run a number of property companies based in Southend under the umbrella of the Regis Group, which has been investing in residential property for more than 50 years.
Its portfolio consisted entirely of properties that were subject to regulated tenancies until the early 1980s, when Regis successfully diversified into property development.
Regis made a £3.2m loss on £7.2m turnover in the five months to March 2009. But it has more than £80m of net assets.
The Goulds and trusts own all the Regis Group and we value the brothers at £80m.
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172 £80m
Melvyn & Delia Grodner
Atmore
2009: £80m (No change)
Melvyn, 66, and Delia Grodner, 57, own Atmore Properties, which made a £3.9m profit on £12m sales in 2008-09. But its net assets fell from £67.6m to £54.5m.
We value the Liverpool-based business on the net assets.
But we can see three small but separate businesses with a further £16m of net assets in 2008-09.
With other property and past salaries, the Grodners are easily worth £80m after tax.
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172 £80m
Bruce Jarvis & Family
Ravensale
2009: £70m (+£10m)
Bruce Jarvis’s main company is Ravensale which, in 2008-09, showed £26.6m net assets.
Jarvis’s Pearcroft operation is also a shareholder in European Land & Property, which is the company behind Paddington Basin. The business showed £15.1m net assets in its 2008 accounts. In all, Jarvis, 62, should be worth £80m.
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172 £80m
Noel & Miriam O’Callaghan
Gold Table
New entry
Noel, 60, and Miriam O’Callaghan, 51, have a sizeable property portfolio in Ireland.
We can see five companies led by Brodnax, which made £4.8m profit on £17.4m sales in 2001, its last filed accounts before it became an unlimited company.
In all, these companies had around £27m of net assets.
The low-key O’Callaghans are now active in Prague housing developments. With property and hotels added, they are easily worth around £80m.
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172 £80m
Shaf Rasul
E-Net
New entry
In 1999, Shaf Rasul created the Edinburgh-based E-net Computers, which has become Europe’s biggest distributor of optical storage products.
The company has £12m of net assets and is easily worth around £30m.
In addition, 40-year-old Rasul is making his mark on the Scottish property front with his industrial estate venture called E-Net Park.
Recently, he sold his letting business Excelet and paid £3m for the former Martin & Frost furniture store in Edinburgh, which he intends to turn into hi-tech apartments.
We can see a further £6m of net assets in other Rasul companies, but his private property investments take him to £80m comfortably.
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172 £80m
The Duke of Richmond & Gordon & Family
Goodwood Estates
New entry
The entrepreneurial Earl of March, heir to the Duke of Richmond & Gordon, has done wonders at the 12,000-acre Goodwood estate in West Sussex.
In 2008, the Goodwood Estate Co pushed up profits from £2m to more than £3.4m on £48.9m sales. It has net assets of around £44.6m. But with land prices rising, and taking into account an incomparable art collection, the family wealth should total £80m.
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172 £80m
Charles Yeates
WS Yeates
2009: £70m (+£10m)
Loughborough-based WS Yeates is involved in property and fine art. In 2009, the company showed £26.3m net assets. Yeates, 74, has overseas property assets and art. We value him at £80m.
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183 £78m
John & Ciara Byrne & Family
Carlisle Trust
New entry
Ninety-year-old John Byrne has been building up his Dublin-based property empire since the 1960s. He is a leading supplier of office space to the public sector and his rental income here is holding up well.
Last year, his companies earned more than €5.7m on nine leases he has with the state. His interests are held mainly through the Carlisle Trust. But the value of its investment properties has fallen significantly, down 38% to €91m in 2008.
Other assets should take the Byrne family to £78m.
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183 £78m
Bill McCabe
LNC Property
2009: £87m (-£9m)
Bill McCabe’s Oyster Capital Partners’ private equity operation invested in Capital D, the residential property investment company that buys and renovates upmarket Dublin houses.
While Capital D went into a loss of €13.5m last year because of slumping property prices, McCabe should not be too badly affected.
He made significant profits in Germany when his LNC property company bought an abandoned waterfront leisure complex in the German City of Bremen for around £40m in 2004. It has since been converted into a shopping, leisure and hotel complex worth in the region of £180m.
In 2007, McCabe’s stake in a Co Kildare waste company, Advanced Environmental Solutions, tripled in value to £11.5m when it was taken over in a £46m deal.
McCabe, 53, made £47m from judicious sales of stakes in SmartForce. LNC grew out of McCabe’s €117m purchase of a mixed property portfolio from Scottish Life in 1999. He is now worth around £78m.
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185 £76m
John Marston & Family
Marston Properties
2009: £75m (+£1m)
Marston Properties Holdings made £1.2m profit on £4.3m sales in 2008-09.
It has £56m net assets but we value it at £50m in today’s difficult economic climate. That values the family stake at around £37m.
Marston Hotels also paid out a £12.1m dividend in 2001 and £5m in 2002 before being sold, netting the family £50m.
Allowing for tax on sale proceeds, we value the Marston family at £76m.
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186 £75m
Debbie Dove
Spey & Dove
New entry
A former north London local estate agent, Debbie Dove, 49, started out by taking a holiday job there in the late 1970s. Within three years she was branch manager and she eventually bought the business. Dove later built up her own luxury property portfolio in the area and offered interior design services. Her portfolio has been valued at up to £80m.
Cautiously, we settle for £75m. Dove is the former wife of top divorce lawyer, Raymond “Jaws” Tooth.
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186 £75m
John Muir & Family
Muir Group
2009: £50m (+£25m)
The latest 2008-09 accounts for property-to-housebuilding Muir Group, show a drop in profit from £10.3m to £1.1m, with sales down £16m at £76.3m. Yet the group, run by 74-year-old John Muir, has a solid balance sheet and £64m net assets.
We value Muir Group at £45m, adding another £20m for the net assets of the separate company, Muir Holdings. Past salaries and dividends take Muir and his family to £75m.
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186 £75m
David Russell
Property Alliance
2009: £75m (No change)
The Russell empire includes developments in Manchester, Oxford, Chorley and Blackburn. His Property Alliance operation has an investment portfolio valued at £240m. After borrowings are stripped out, it showed £54.5m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts.
With other assets, such as the sale of the Pinnacle office building in 2005 for £16m, Russell, 54, is worth £75m.
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186 £75m
Duncan Sinclair & Family
Mountview Estates
2009: £76m (-£1m)
Despite the poor financial climate, London-based residential investor Mountview Estates doubled its pretax profit to £29.3m in 2009. It has seen its share price steady in 2010 and it is now worth nearly £155m.
The company is chaired by accountant Duncan Sinclair, 63, and the Sinclair family’s stake is worth around £70m. We add another £5m for stakes in smaller private companies such as Ossian Investors and Sinclair Estates.
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190 £73m
Michael Slade
Helical Bar
2009: £72m (+£1m)
Michael Slade, 64, has always been good at calling the market. So it was interesting to hear his Helical Bar operation say in August that it was seeing further evidence that the recovery in property values was stalling.
The company, which had been out spending earlier in the year, said it would look to buy only properties offering “exceptional growth or income potential”.
With this in mind, Helical is working on plans for a major City development, after buying up 1 Mitre Square, EC3, and an adjoining site in June.
Slade’s stake in Helical Bar has not been immune from the market crash, but it has recovered and is now worth £44m.
He also made a £1.3m gain from exercising share options in 2004, £4m in 2005 and £4.4m in 2006. A special dividend for Helical Bar shareholders totalling £107m in late 2004 resulted in a further £12m going to Slade.
Past salaries, stakes in other venturesand his own property assets, should easily take Slade to around £73m after tax.
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191 £72m
Michael Heller & Family
London & Associated Properties
2009: £67m (+£5m)
Listed retail specialist London & Associated Properties said in August that its rental income had risen slightly in the first half of the year, to £8.6m.
Controlled by the Hellers since the early 1970s, it sold the former King’s Road antiques market Antiquarius for £17.82m, a 5.74% yield, earlier this year to freeholder Cadogan. The Heller’s stake in the firm is worth £21m.
The Heller family also have a majority stake in the quoted Bisichi Mining which, together with other holdings and property interests, takes them to around £72m.
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191 £72m
Jeremy Middleton
Homeserve
New entry
Homeserve, the quoted household repair services group, has seen its shares soar in 2010.
The Walsall-based company was co-founded by Jeremy Middleton, 50, in 1993.
It is now worth more than £1.5bn. Middleton retains a £57m stake.
He has other assets, including a property company – Cortonwood 1 – with £3.6m net assets. In all, he is worth £72m.
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193 £70m
Demi Chervak & Family
High Point
2009: £52m (+£18m)
High Point saw its net assets rise from £35.2m to £41.3m in the year to July 2009. Chervak, 56, and his family own it all.
We value the business on the net assets, adding £27m for the net assets of another five Chervak companies.
With other assets, the Chervak family should easily be worth around £70m.
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193 £70m
Nicholas Porter
Unite
New entry
Nick Porter, founder of Unite, left the board in May 2010 and is now building his Capital Values Group. It is working on the huge Kings Cross Central project in London to develop student homes.
Porter, 41, retains a £1m stake in Unite, but since 2004, he has sold at least £70m worth of shares. With other assets, he is worth around £70m.
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195 £69m
Mark & Kathleen Kavanagh
Hardwicke
2009: £69m (No change)
Mark Kavanagh’s Hardwicke was one of the early developers involved in Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre.
Kavanagh, 65, and his wife Kathleen, 49, have two main companies – Hardwicke and Kopian, with £53.5m of net assets between them in their 2005-06 accounts – the last published.
The former Wicklow-based couple now live in Switzerland. We value them at £69m.
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196 £67m
Roger Wickens & Family
Store Property
2009: £89m (-£22m)
In 2008-09, Store Property’s profits fell from £4.2m to £3.6m on sales of £10.8m, but its net assets fell sharply in value from £100.3m to £55m.
With a solid balance sheet, the Sussex-based company should be worth the net asset figure.
We add £9m to the Wickens family for past dividends and the £2.8m net assets of the separate Kingmere.
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196 £67m
Woon Wing Yip & Family
W. Wing Yip Properties
2009: £72m (-£5m)
Wing Yip stores, complete with Chinese cookery schools, are more like community centres than traditional cash-and-carry outlets.
It works. In the year to September 2009, W Wing Yip Brothers Trading made £5.2m profit on £97.1m sales. It has £27.9m net assets. The family also has a property portfolio held in the separate W Wing Yip & Brothers Property & Investments, with nearly £21m net assets in 2009.
The two firms should be worth £55m. Minority stakes in smaller operations add £12m to the Yip family.
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198 £66m
Rupert Mucklow & Family
A&J Mucklow
2009: £60m (+£6m)
Midlands-based property outfit Mucklow suffered in the property downturn. Its shares fell sharply in 2008-09, but they have recovered recently and the Mucklow family stake is now worth £64m. Past salaries and dividends add £2m.
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198 £66m
Sean Mulryan
Ballymore Properties
2009: £280m (-£214m)
Mulryan has been hit hard by the Irish property crash. Ballymore International Developments made a £61m loss in 2008. Mulryan owns 51%.
His other assets include a 49.5% stake in Markland Holdings, with £91.2m net assets in 2008. Mulryan also has a half-share in a Kildare shopping centre.
A sports fanatic, he has 60 racehorses and a 230-acre stud. But an extensive UK portfolio helps keep Mulryan, 56, in this list at £66m.
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198 £66m
Eamonn O’Rourke
ORM
New entry
Dublin-based O’Rourke built up Cash & Carry Kitchens in Cork. Its parent, ORM, made a £5.2m profit on £19.3m sales in 2008.
It has £45m net assets. O’Rourke, 62, has some property firms, including AFA Investments. In all, he is easily worth £66m.
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201 £65m
Philip Davies & Family
Philip J Davies
New entry
Philip Davies left the merchant navy in 1945 to join his family clothing business. After five years he branched out on his own. By 1970, he realised that making clothing was not as profitable as property investment and built a portfolio mainly in the North.
Davies, 89, has a private company, Philip J Davies, which saw net assets hit £21.5m in 2009-10 when it made an £713,000 profit. His private property partnerships take his total assets to £65m.
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201 £65m
James Egan
Broomford Holdings
2009: £48m (+£17m)
Irishman James Egan owns and runs London-based property operation Broomford Holdings. It showed £49.2m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts. We can see another £16.4m net assets in the 2008-09 accounts of three separate Broomford companies.
Egan bought Noel Edmonds’ West Country home. It was reported to have been sold for around £10m. We value Egan, 69, at around £65m.
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201 £65m
Jim Leavesley & Family
Evans Property Holdings
2009: £66m (-£1m)
The Leavesley family wealth comes mainly from property, particularly the Midlands group, St Modwen. The recent stock market turmoil has hit the shares and the family stake is now worth £32m.
But Leavesley, 70, has also been involved in another large property group, Evans Property Holdings. The family’s stake should be worth £20m in today’s market.
With other assets, such as a pig operation and a small property firm, the Leavesley family should be worth £65m.
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201 £65m
Andrew & Sharon Turner
Central Trust
2009: £65m (No change)
Early this year, Central Trust secured an extra £90m of funding from RBS and National Bank of Australia to re-enter the secured lending market.
But the Norwich-based financial broker was hit hard by the financial crisis in 2008-09. It made a £12.5m loss on £49.5m sales in 2009 but it still has £87.6m net assets.
Andrew Turner, 52, set up Central Trust in 1987 and built it into one of the largest independent finance brokers offering loans to UK homeowners. It is easily worth £65m. Other assets take Turner and his wife Sharon, 53, also a director, to £65m.
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205 £62m
Giles Mackay
Hometrack
New entry
A barrister turned property entrepreneur, Mackay bought Ford UK’s residential assets for £60m in 1993 and later set up PXS, the largest independent player in the part-exchange market. Mackay started Hometrack.com which established a property index based on information on sales in specific post codes. He had an 86% stake in the parent company.
In 2008-09, Hometrack made a £1.8m loss on £9.9m sales. It is easily worth £20m. We can see another £22.2m of net assets owned by Mackay in two other firms. Mackay, 48, is worth £62m.
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205 £62m
Cavan Pickering & Family
Pickering Properties
2009: £50m (+£12m)
The family-owned Pickering Properties operation got a good price when it sold a City office block for £19m – a 5% yield – this summer to Invista Real Estate Investment Management.
The company made £3.5m profit on £9m turnover in 2008-09, but reported £27.6m of net assets. Cavan Pickering, 74, built and ran three hotels in Nottingham, including the Welbeck, sold in 2002 for £6.5m. Other assets take the wider Pickering family to £62m.
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205 £62m
Simon & Paul Upward
Ocobase
2009: £57m (+£5m)
Croydon based Ocobase saw its 2008-09 profits fall from £5.2m to £3.1m on turnover of £5.3m. Its net assets, though, were down just £1m at £66.8m. With low borrowings, it is worth £55m. We add another £7m for other assets.
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208 £61m
William Rankin & Family
Hanro
2009: £96m (-£35m)
William Rankin, 79, chairs Newcastle developer Hanro. In 2008, Hanro’s profits fell from £3.8m to £847,000. The company revalued its properties, resulting in a sharp fall in the net asset figure from £103m to nearly £65m. We value the business at £55m,and add another £6m to the wider Rankin family for other assets and past dividends.
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209 £60m
Paul Bassi
Bond Wolfe
New entry
Paul Bassi has been having a pretty good year: he was made a CBE in January and soon afterwards was able to report that his Real Estate Investors business had swung back into the black.
Bassi, 48, is chief executive of the AIM-listed firm, where he holds a 16.8% stake worth £5.2m. The company posted a pretax profit of £4.3m for 2009, up from a loss of £15.7m the previous year. Bassi also chairs property firm Bond Wolfe.
We can see £18m of net assets in various Bond Wolfe firms attributable to Bassi. Personal assets push Bassi to £60m.
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209 £60m
David Gradel & Family
UK Estates
New entry
UK Estates had nearly £49m of net assets in its 2008-09 accounts, down £1m. However, the Gradel family has significant wealth outside UK Estates, including large property portfolios in Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham, and is valued at £60m today.
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209 £60m
Alan & Edward Lee
Princeton Investments
New entry
Earlier this year, receivers were called in on a series of regional office investments in which the Lee family were involved with HBOS during the boom but, in the same month, the Lees’ Princeton Investments purchased a £12m block in Soho for redevelopment.
The brothers’ father, Arnold, built up Imry and sold out for £20m just before the 1987 crash. Princeton showed a £113,000 profit on £350,000 sales in 2009. They still have a valuable portfolio and are very active so we stick with our £60m valuation.
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209 £60m
John Miskelly
MTS
New entry
Downpatrick has received a major boost with the announcement of plans for a new, £14m deluxe hotel by entrepreneur John Miskelly. He also owns pubs, a nursing home operation and Miskelly Construction. We can see £2.5m net assets in the 2009 accounts of various companies but Miskelly, 47, is worth perhaps £60m today.
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209 £60m
Raymond Mould
London & Stamford
2009: £60m (No change)
Property company London & Stamford became a real estate investment trust recently to take advantage of tax savings.
The Guernsey-based investor, led by industry veterans Raymond Mould and Patrick Vaughan, will pay £55m to buy its founder out of its management contract. It floated on the stock market in 2007 valued at £248m. It is now worth £567m as investors back Mould’s ability to find bargains at rock bottom prices.
Mould collected £53m from the takeovers of Arlington and, later, Pillar Property, his earlier property ventures. He has a near £9m stake in London & Stamford. We reckon Mould, 69, is worth £60m after tax.
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214 £59m
Gerry Conlan
Quando
2009: £98m (-£39m)
Jerry Conlan sold 400 acres in Naas for ¤340m in 2006 and invested his share in a healthcare business. He was among the group of investors who bought a 10% stake in ailing Anglo Irish Bank in 2008, borrowing 75% of the purchase price from the bank itself. The bank was nationalised a few months later. Conlan, 45, has bought properties in Boston, Wicklow and Dublin. But with values down he is worth £59m.
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215 £58m
John Finlan & Family
Morbaine Properties
New entry
The Finlan family owns Morbaine Properties, a private group based in Widnes. Started in 1963, Morbaine made a £588,000 profit on sales of £17.4m in 2008-09. Its net assets came in at £53.4m. Most of the shares in Morbaine are held in trust but we assume the Finlan family owns them. Boss John Finlan, 69, is here representing the wider Finlan clan. We value the company on the net assets. Other assets take the family to £58m.
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215 £58m
John Nike & Family
Nike Land Securities
New entry
Nike Land Securities, run and owned by John Nike, made a £3.6m loss on turnover of £65m in 2008-09, but still has nearly £24m of net assets. Nike, 75, owns all the business with his family and trusts.
Nike has sold tracts of land to Dell and Hewlett-Packard, raising more than £40m. With other assets, he is worth £58m.
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215 £58m
Amanda Yates & Family
Yates Property
2009: £50m (+£8m)
Amanda Yates, 61, is a director of Yates Property Holdings. The firm’s 2008-09 accounts show net assets of nearly £58m. It is owned by the Yates family, who we value on this figure.
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218 £57m
Solomon Potel & Family
Fairholme Estates
2009: £52m (+£5m)
Fairholme Estates, a property developer and building contractor, is owned by Solomon Potel, 77. In the year to August 2009, it made £3m profit on £4.4m turnover. It has more than £55m net assets and we value the business on this figure. Other assets take the family to £57m.
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219 £56m
Dan McCauley
Rotolok
New entry
With a 25.4% stake, McCauley is the biggest shareholder in property outfit Sutton Harbour. He also owns Rotolok where profits came in at £3.9m on turnover of £21.8m in 2008-09.
With £23m net assets, it is worth around £36m. McCauley also owns Drake’s Island in Plymouth. Other assets take McCauley, 74, to around £56m.
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219 £56m
David Metter
Innisfree Group
New entry
Metter, 58, has a 72% stake in Innisfree, which made a £6.9m profit on a £15.9m turnover in 2008-09. Even in today’s climate, it should easily be worth £75m, valuing Metter’s stake at around £54m. Past salaries and dividends take him to £56m.
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219 £56m
Robin Tomkins & Family
Grainger Trust
New entry
In 2006, Robin Tomkins, 84, sold off the Triangle shopping complex at Frinton on Sea, Essex. It was sold by Tomkins Frincon Securities, which showed £2.2m net assets in 2008-09.
Tomkins started as an estate agent in Essex but built up a profitable property business which was taken over by Grainger Trust for £61m in October 1994. With the 2006 sale and the net assets in Frincon, we value the Tomkins family at £56m.
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222 £55m
Elizabeth Abbott & Family
Abbott Bros
2009: £45m (+£10m)
Abbott Bros Holdings, a property investment company, made a £1.9m profit and had £44.2m net assets in 2008-09. In late 2009, it was wound up when it was stated that the company’s assets were £45.9m and its liabilities just £773,000. The company assets are worth £45.2m. Past dividends and other assets should take the Abbott family to £55m.
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222 £55m
Douglas Woolf & Family
Romulus
2009: £60m (-£5m)
Romulus Holdings, a Leicester-based property group, is owned by Douglas Woolf, 73, and his family trusts. It showed £49.9m net assets in 2008-09 when it made £897,000 profit on £10.9m turnover. The company should easily be worth £50m in this climate. We add £5m, taking the Woolf family to £55m.
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224 £54m
Glyn Watkin Jones & Family
Watkin Jones
New entry
Construction and development group Watkin Jones saw turnover fall slightly in the year to September 2009 from £113m to £95.9m. Profits were down from £15.3m to £12.3m.
The group is heavily involved in the growing student housing market. In January, it bought a site in Hoxton, one of London’s largest student housing development sites, from Goldcrest Land for £10.9m. And in April it sold two student housing blocks in Liverpool and Loughborough to Gatehouse Bank for £29.2m.
The Watkin Jones family also has a small company called Heritage Holdings (North Wales) which made an £8.5m profit on the sale of a property in 2005. We value them at £54m.
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225 £53m
Melvyn Cooper & Family
Mountcharm
New entry
Mel Cooper and his family own and run Mountcharm, a Barnet-property investment company. Cooper, 69, shrewdly sold 90% of its portfolio in 2006 at the top of the market and concentrated on development.
Mountcharm’s net assets exceeded £39.1m at the end of 2008. Other smaller company assets add £4m. In May 2006, Cooper bought a building in Tel Aviv. He sold it two years later for around double the price. We value the Cooper family at £53m.
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225 £53m
Fred Pritchard & Family
Pritchard
2009: £48m (+£5m)
Pritchard, 67, owns Hednesford-based Pritchard Holdings, a property group with £50m of net assets in 2009, when it made a £1m loss on £7.1m sales. It is worth its net assets. Smaller property operations add another £3m to Pritchard’s wealth.
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225 £53m
Andrew Ruhan & Family
Bridgehouse Capital
New entry
Developers of Birmingham’s £500m, 2m sq ft mixed-use Arena Central are seeking a planning extension until 2020 as the market has been in the doldrums.
Andrew Ruhan’s Bridgehouse Capital is one of the scheme’s partners. Ruhan is also busy elsewhere in property. In 2008, his Bridgehouse operation sold three hotels to Hand Picked Hotels for £30m.
Ruhan, 48, has always been a pioneer in the property field. In 1998, he put all his money into buying the former Financial Times printworks in London’s Docklands. He turned the building into one of the UK’s first telehouses through his company, Global Switch.
In early 2000, Elliott Bernerd’s Chelsfield and a Canadian investor paid nearly £88m to take a 66% stake, leaving Ruhan with a third of the equity. In 2002, he sold his remaining stake in Global for an undisclosed sum.
Since then Ruhan has been buying hi-tech businesses in the US, including Navisite. He also chairs Global Marine Systems, which in 2008 made £4.6m profit on £85.2m sales. With £132.5m net assets, it is a £200m company. We reckon that Ruhan has at least a £30m stake there. Other stakes in Coltham Developments and Stockdale Properties add £3m of net assets to Ruhan’s wealth. In all, he should easily be worth £53m.
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228 £52m
George Akins & Family
SJC 14
New entry
The Akins family sold its betting shops in 2003 for £14m to concentrate on casino, nightclub and property operations. Its main Nottingham-based firms, SJC 14 and SJC 15, had more than £37m net assets in their 2009 accounts. With other assets, the family is worth around £52m.
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228 £52m
Richard Higgins & Family
Higgins
New entry
London’s role in staging the 2012 Olympic Games is a boon for the Higgins Group. East London’s redevelopment in preparation for the games has proved a fillip for the family-owned construction and property group.
The company has also benefited from demand for new housing along the M11 corridor and in the Thames Gateway. The Essex-based operation saw its profits come in at £1m on £224.8m sales in 2008-09. We value it on its £50m net assets, adding £2m for other assets to the Higgins family.
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228 £52m
Mark Kay
ROK
2009: £48m (+£4m)
Mark Kay, who founded Rockeagle, was a prominent South West developer. In 2001, he sold the business to the local EBC construction firm in a £14.7m deal and it was renamed ROK Property Solutions.
Kay joined the board but left in 2005 when he sold his stake for £14.3m. He sued for unpaid bonuses and ROK agreed to pay £1.25m, a figure we add to our calculations. Kay also has around £30.9m of net assets in firms such as Eagle One Investment Holdings in 2008-09. With other assets, Kay, 50, is a £52m man.
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228 £52m
Tony Leonard
Clarendon
New entry
Irish developer Tony Leonard, 58, owns half of Clarendon Properties, a fast-growing Dublin property group. In early 2007, Clarendon and other investors made a £48m profit on the sale of 16 shops in London’s Covent Garden area, bought three years earlier for £79m.
But Clarendon, which also owns the Powerscourt centre in Dublin, is increasingly focusing on the US. It has £95.8m net assets in 2007-08. Leonard’s sale proceeds and 50% stake in Clarendon are worth £52m in all.
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232 £50m
Linda Ashley
Current Design
New entry
Swedish-born Ashley, 44, is the ex-wife of Mike Ashley, the sportswear billionaire who also owns Newcastle United.
A property developer, she has stakes in several small businesses, including Watford-based Current Design and, with her divorce settlement, is worth at least £50m.
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232 £50m
David Dangoor & Family
Monopro
New entry
David Dangoor, 61, is managing director of Monopro, a property company based in London. The Dangoor family has at least 73% of the shares. In the year to June 2009, Monopro made a £1.4m profit on nearly £3.6m sales. With nearly £56.3m net assets, it is worth that sum. That makes the family stake worth £48m. But a number of other companies add perhaps £4m, taking the Dangoor family to £50m.
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232 £50m
Malcolm Hall
Nobel
New entry
Malcolm Hall is a property developer based in Jersey. His main company, Nobel Property Developments, showed £12m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts. But we can see at least another £3.7m of net assets in further companies such as MSJ Properties and Steelux Holdings.
Aside from his £3m Jersey mansion, Hall, 74, also has homes in London and Florida. His total wealth was put at around £50m in late 2005 during a widely reported court case involving Hall and his stepdaughter over money. We value him at that figure.
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232 £50m
Robert Jolly & Family
Limes
2009: £46m (+£4m)
Lincoln-based Limes Developments is owned by Robert Jolly, 73, and his family. In 2009 it made £3.1m profit on £4.2m sales, but its net assets rose from £42.8m to £43.6m. The Jolly family also owns the separate Limes Estates with £6.4m net assets. In the current economic climate, we value them at £50m.
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232 £50m
Jerry & Janet Knight
Lexadon
2009: £50m (No change)
Lexadon, a London-based property operation, was active in Clapham and Brixton in the 1980s, buying up and converting homes bought at auction from Lambeth council. In 2000, Lexadon started work on bigger developments. It retained many of the properties and its net assets came in at £26.7m in 2008-09. Other assets take the Knights to £50m.
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232 £50m
Roger Raymond & Family
NEEB
2009: £50m (No change)
Roger Raymond, 56, runs the family-owned NEEB Holdings, based in Colchester. Founded in 1959, NEEB, the parent company, showed over £26.3m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts, but its assets could be worth around £30m as they are in the accounts at cost. Other assets, including a family property partnership, take the Raymond family to £50m.
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232 £50m
John & Stephen Rosefield
Endeavour
2009: £60m (-£10m)
John, 66, and Stephen Rosefield, 57, are directors of Endeavour, a London property group. The Rosefield family and family trusts own Endeavour, which made £1.5m profit on £6.9m sales in 2008-09. Its net assets fell to £32.2m. But its subsidiary, Estates & Agency Holdings, shows £69.1m net assets, so we value the Rosefield family at £50m.
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232 £50m
David Stevenson & Family
Ashleybank Investments
2009: £50m (No change)
Stevenson, 68, transformed his father’s dye company in the Scottish Borders into Edinburgh Woollen Mill, a clothes retailer.
In 1997, Grampian Holdings took over EWM, paying £69m, netting the Stevenson family around £33m. In 2005, the Stevenson family made another £6m when its former stablemate, the Malcolm Group, was taken private. The family put its wealth into Ashleybank Investments, which invests in residential.
Ashleybank had around £41.2m of net assets in 2008-09. With other assets, the Stevenson family is worth around £50m.
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240 £48m
Peter Rich & Family
Rich Investments
New entry
Assets at property company, Rich Investments, came in at £51.1m in 2008-09. It is owned by Peter Rich, 56, and family trusts. We value the company under the net asset figure at £46m, adding £2m to the Rich family for property, taking it to £48m.
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240 £48m
Richard Ross & Family
Regentsmead
2009: £48m (No change)
Richard Ross chairs Regentsmead, a property and financial group created in 1934 by his entrepreneurial immigrant father and run by Ross, 68, for more than 20 years. We have discounted net assets to £48m on profits of £2m in 2008-9, and value the Ross family at that level.
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242 £47m
Charles & Anne Scrutton
Scrutton
New entry
Founded in 1962, Scrutton Estates is a property company based in the east end of London. It is owned and run by Charles, 65, and Anne Scrutton, 62. In 2008-09, the business made over £1.6m profit on £2.2m sales. But its net asset figure rose to £44.5m.
In the current climate, it is worth the net asset figure. Other assets should take the Scruttons to around £47m.
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243 £46m
John Elkington
Penhurst
2009: £48m (-£2m)
John Elkington, 47, owns Kent-based Penhurst Properties. It has net assets of £27m in 2010. Other assets and past dividends and share buy-backs in the past five years take Elkington to around £46m.
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243 £46m
Brian Moss & Family
GAT
New entry
Brian Moss runs Gat Holdings, a South Wales-based property group. It made £1.6m profit on £3.4m sales in 2008-09 when its net assets rose slightly to £30.7m. It should easily be worth £30m. The business is owned by the Moss family and trusts. Moss, 74, also founded Nuaire Holdings, which sold for £38m in 2004. The Moss family is worth around £46m.
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245 £45m
James Barham
Bayfordbury Estates
New entry
James Barham stepped down as chairman of Bayfordbury Holdings in 2004 after selling the business to Fairview. Analysts reckoned the sale price would be around £60m, which accorded with Bayfordbury’s 2003-04 net assets of £55m.
Hertford-based Barham, 73, now concentrates on his other companies, Bayfordbury Estates and PAJ Properties, with nearly £1.1m net assets between them in 2009. With other assets and past dividends, Barham is easily worth £45m after tax.
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245 £45m
Ben Brodie
Carrick Capital
2009: £45m (No change)
Ben Brodie founded Carrick Care Homes in 1986. Brodie owned it all until its sale to Bupa, the healthcare giant, in 2004 for more than £40m. Brodie, 58, is now involved in property development through Bothwell Bridge Estates with £343,000 net assets in 2008-09. We value him at £45m.
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245 £45m
Charles Lousada & Family
Lousada
New entry
Charles Lousada, 72, founded his property company, Lousada, in 1969. It made a £1.4m profit in the year to September 2009. With £44.4m net assets it is worth that sum. Other assets add £1m to the Lousada family.
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245 £45m
James Spencer & Family
Spencer Commercial Property
New entry
Spencer Commercial is a property group based on Merseyside. Run by chairman James Spencer, 76, it made a £744,000 profit on £14.1m sales in 2008-09. But the company has £45m of net assets. Cautiously, we value the business and the Spencer family at £45m.
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245 £45m
Christopher Ure & Family
ATC Properties
2009: £47m (-£2m)
ATC Properties is owned by Christopher Ure, 48, and his family trusts. It had £40.5m net assets in its 2008-09 accounts when it made £2m profit on £4.8m sales and we value the business at £40m. Past dividends and other assets should take the Ures to £45m easily.
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250 £44m
Alistair Pullan & Family
J Pullan
New entry
Alistair Pullan, 51, runs J Pullan & Sons, a Leeds-based property-to construction group. In 2009, it made £3.2m profit and had £41.2m of net assets. It is worth that sum. The family also own Horus, with £1.8m net assets. Dividends take the Pullan family to £44m.
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Estates Gazette Rich List 2010: Rules of engagement
1. Valuations for quoted property companies are usually based on their share price as at early September 2010. For private companies we have based valuations largely on their latest net asset figure. After the credit crunch and property crash, we have been cautious in our private company valuations.
Where accounts are not up-to-date, we have discounted their net asset figure by 10% or more (depending on the strength of their balance sheet) in arriving at our valuation.
2. We have also been influenced by levels of borrowings, the strength of the balance sheet and credit ratings in arriving at our figures. Where private companies pay large salaries to their owner-directors, we have added a proportion of the salary to our profit and wealth calculation.
3. Though there may be some concern that we have not cut our valuations deeply enough to reflect the economic crisis of late 2008 and early 2009, we take comfort from the fact that private companies are much more conservative in their balance sheets and that the net asset figure may not reflect the true position.
Second, many of the property tycoons who have private property companies also have large assets elsewhere that we do not know about. Finally, the rate of decline in values and economic activity may have now stabilised, which helps to underpin our values.
4. We have counted family trusts as part of family shareholdings in making our assessments of company ownerships.
5. Only those who have made all or a significant part of their fortunes in property investment, trading or related areas, such as estate agency, qualify for this list. Where construction magnates have a significant property element, we have included or excluded them on a case-by-case basis.
Where retail tycoons such as Sir Philip Green of Arcadia have used property trades to help them on their way to fortunes, we have not included them.
The Queen is not included as she does not have full control of the Crown Estate in the normal meaning of the word. Most landowners are also excluded, unless – like the Duke of Westminster – their wealth derives from urban property holdings.
Inevitably we will have missed people who feel they should have been included. We ask them to send in their details for next year to Philipberesford@aol.com.
Any other comments also gratefully received here.
All our calculations for valuations are ballpark figures, which may be challenged by those listed. We will adjust valuations next year for any who feel that we have been too wide of the mark.
Dr Philip Beresford and Dominic Price
