202 Demi Chervak & family
£76m
High Point Estates
Demi Chervak is managing director of the Harrogate-based High Point Estates property group. Founded in 1985, High Point saw its net assets rise from £43.5m to £46.3m in 2010-11.
The company is also active in the south and, in 2006, purchased a department store, Caleys, in Windsor for redevelopment.
Chervak and his family own the whole of High Point. We value the business on the net assets, adding £26.5m for the net assets of another five separate Chervak companies such as High Point (Bury).
With other assets and cash, the Chervak family should easily be worth £76m in the current climate.
203 Debbie Dove
£75m
Spyer & Dove
Debbie Dove is looking at two European hotspots offering short-term yields of around 5%; as a prime real estate broker, she has London and Cannes in her sights.
A former local estate agent in North London, Dove started out after her A-levels by taking a holiday job with a local estate agent in the late 1970s.
Within three years she was branch manager and eventually bought the business.
She later built up her own luxury property portfolio in the area and offered interior design services to wealthy clients.
Dove’s portfolio has been valued at up to £80m. Cautiously, we settle for £75m.
She is the former wife of top divorce lawyer Raymond “Jaws” Tooth.
204 Andrew & Sharon Turner
£74m
Central Trust
Andrew Turner chairs mortgage broker Central Trust, which he set up in 1987 as a broker and lender of secured loans in the consumer finance sector.
Norwich-based Central Trust’s principal subsidiary is one of the largest independent finance brokers offering loans to UK homeowners, while other subsidiaries operate in the loan packaging, mortgage packaging and telemarketing markets.
In 2011, it made £3.4m profit on £39.8m turnover. In the current economic climate, we value Central Trust, which has £90.7m net assets, at around £72m.
Other assets should take Turner and his wife Sharon, also a director, to £74m.
205 Ray Horney
£73m
Real Estate Opportunities
Property group Real Estate Opportunities has been making headlines over the sale of its shares in Battersea Power Station. The group has a hefty overall debt of £1.5bn,
and reported a £75m loss for the year ended 31 August 2011.
REO also recently delisted from the AIM. The company is chaired by veteran property man Ray Horney, whose early career was renting washing machines to Brighton council tenants in the 1950s. Later, he 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, a West Indies chain floated in 1994.
Three years later, Horney made another £27m when it was sold. His past sale proceeds and stakes in other property groups take him to £73m.
206= Austin Baird & family
£72m
Ravenhill Estates
Austin Baird is now quietly working as a property developer through a company called Ravenhill Estates. It had £8.5m net assets in 2010 and Baird owns it all.
The Baird family previously owned Bairds Chemists, Northern Ireland’s largest chain of pharmacies. It was taken over by Alliance Unichem in May 2005 in an £81m deal.
The family followed this by selling the chemist shops that they still owned for £20m.
We assume that they reinvested some of the proceeds in property assets such as Ravenhill. The Baird family should be worth £72m today.
206= Melvyn & Delia Grodner
£72m
Atmore Properties
Melvyn and Delia Grodner own Atmore Properties, which made £6.5m profit on £12.1m sales in 2010-11.
We value the Liverpool-based business on its £48.5m net assets. But we can see at least another £13m net assets in other smaller but separate businesses.
Other assets take the Grodners to perhaps £72m.
208= David Dangoor & family
£70m
Monopro
David Dangoor runs Monopro, a family-dominated property company based in London. In 2010-11, Monopro made a £1.1m profit on £4.3m sales. With net assets of more than £67m, it is worth that sum.
But a number of other small companies, such as Discdale, add perhaps another £3m, taking the Dangoor family to £70m.
208= David Metter
£70m
Innisfree Group
David Metter’s Innisfree property operation made a £10.3m profit on £18.9m sales in 2010-11. He set up Innisfree in the mid-1990s after a career in the construction and property investment business.
While the Private Finance Initiative was still in its infancy, he sold the idea of a specialist PFI investment vehicle to Hermes, the giant BT pension fund that took a near 36% shareholding in Innisfree, though it sold it back to Metter in 2006 for £13m. Metter now has a 72% stake held via a Jersey trust.
Innisfree, based in the City, has committed more than £1bn to 56 projects, including NHS hospitals, schools, the Whitehall HQ of the Ministry of Defence, a Scottish motorway and a Welsh jail.
Innisfree should be worth £90m based on the above sales and profit figures, valuing Metter’s stake at around £65m.
Past salaries and dividends should take him to £70m.
208= Keith Miller & family
£70m
Miller Group
Miller group, the Edinburgh-based housebuilder and developer, is taking American private equity group Blackstone on board as an investor. In a complex deal, Blackstone is paying £160m for a 50% stake, enabling Miller to cut its £600m debt mountain.
Chief executive Keith Miller, who took the helm in 1994 and oversaw the company’s rapid growth, is staying on.
HBOS bought a stake in Miller in April 2008 in a deal which valued the company at around £500m. However, with the housing crash, we now value the Miller family’s remaining stake and any sale proceeds at around £70m.
208= Nicholas Porter
£70m
Urbanest
Nicholas Porter’s Urbanest is reported to be close to buying Westminster Place on London’s South Bank and is thought to be working on plans for up to 1,000 beds at the scheme, which would require consent for change of use from office to residential from Lambeth council.
Urbanest is also working on development at the huge King’s Cross development in central London.
Porter started as a property developer but moved into building new student accommodation through Unite in 1991.
Share sales and other assets take him to £70m.
208= Glyn Watkin Jones & family
£70m
Watkin Jones
Construction group Watkin Jones saw sales rise sharply in 2011 from £142m to £185.8m. The group, which has projects throughout the UK, also showed profit up slightly from £10.6m to £11m. It should be worth its £68.5m net assets.
Glyn is the eighth generation of the Watkin Jones family to run the Bangor-based company, founded in 1791, and his son Mark is now taking more responsibility on the board as a ninth generation is lined up.
The company has done well from building student accommodation and general construction work, which has helped shield it from the credit crunch and collapse in housebuilding.
The family also has a small company called Heritage Holdings (North Wales). With other assets, we value the Watkin Jones family at £70m.
208= James Watts & family
£70m
Corporate Investments
James Watts’ fortune is reportedly a mixture of inherited family wealth and investments in homoeopathic medicine, as well as property.
The net assets at Corporate Associates, an Essex-based property group, came in at nearly £48m in 2010-11.
The business is owned by James Watts and his family.
Among its schemes is the Tollgate retail park near Colchester. The Watts family also has other smaller but separate property groups with another £34m net assets in 2010-11. Allowing for any duplication, the Watts family is easily worth £70m.
214 Solomon Potel & family
£69m
Fairholme Estates (Holdings)
Fairholme Estates (Holdings), a London-based property developer and building contractor, is owned by chartered accountant Solomon Potel and his family trusts.
In the year to August 2011, the company made a very juicy £3.7m profit on £5.1m sales.
It has nearly £67m net assets and we value the business on this figure. Other assets take the Potel family to £69m.
215 Philip Davies & family
£68m
Philip J Davies (Holdings)
Philip J Davies left the merchant navy in 1945 to join his family clothing business. Then, after five years, he decided to branch out on his own.
By 1970, Davies realised that making clothing was not nearly as profitable as property investment and so he set to work building up a valuable portfolio, mainly in the North.
He also branched out into estate and property management. The diversification away from the rag trade has made him a rich man.
His company, Philip J Davies (Holdings), had nearly £16.6m net assets in 2010-11 and made a £6.3m profit.
Davies’ private property partnership take his total assets to £68m.
216= James Egan
£67m
Broomford Holdings
Irishman James Egan owns and runs Broomford Holdings, a London-based property operation. It shows £49.3m net assets in its 2010-11 accounts.
We can see another £11.3m net assets in the accounts of three further but separate Egan companies. Egan bought Noel Edmonds’ West Country home after the television star’s marriage broke down in 2005. The property was reported to have been sold for around £10m.
Today, we value Egan at £67m.
216= Sir John Hall & family
£67m
Cameron Hall Developments
Sir John Hall bowed out of his beloved Magpies in 2007 when he sold his family’s 41.6% stake in Newcastle United Football Club for £55m to sportswear billionaire Mike Ashley.
Hall, the son of a miner, is now battling prostate cancer and is spearheading a £3m campaign for new cancer equipment in the North East.
He escaped from life underground to work for the National Coal Board’s estate department.
Born in the Northumberland mining village of North Seaton in 1933, Hall began his career as a colliery surveyor. He then moved into estate agency in Sunderland and later property development by buying supermarkets and renovating old houses, moving up steadily to develop the UK’s first out-of-town shopping centre, the MetroCentre, in 1979.
Hall pocketed around £70m when it was sold in 1987 to the Church Commissioners. Much of that money was invested in Hall’s dream to turn the Magpies into a world-class team, with funds also lavished on other sporting ventures, such as the local rugby team.
By 1998 the Hall family had a controlling stake in the club and sold a 6.3% share for £10m. Having retired to Spain in 1997, Hall returned to the UK in 2003 to resume his property developing role.
The family property company, Cameron Hall, showed an increase in net assets in 2010 to £26.7m.
With the Newcastle United stake sale and his Wynyard development, we cautiously value the Halls at £67m after tax.
216= Rupert Mucklow & family
£67m
A&J Mucklow
Birmingham Real Estate Investment Trust A&J Mucklow reported in May
that the Midlands industrial occupier market had shown some encouraging signs of improvement since the half-year ended 31 December 2011, particularly
from trade operators, but its vacancy rate had increased marginally from 6.5% to 6.9%.
The business, started in 1933 as a housebuilding operation, is now run by Rupert Mucklow, who took over when his father Albert retired as chairman in 2004.
A&J Mucklow floated on the stock market in 1962 and ceased housebuilding in the 1990s to concentrate on property investment.
The Mucklow family has a 31.7% stake now worth £67m. Past salaries and dividends add £3m.
219= Bruce Jarvis & family
£66m
Ravensale
European Land, the joint venture between Bruce Jarvis and the Reuben brothers, is planning a 21-storey residential tower known as 3 Merchant Square at its Paddington development. Work is due
for completion in 2014.
Plans for the mixed-use tower, including a 90-bedroom hotel and private residential accommodation, were approved by Westminster city council last year. It was a vindication of European Land’s decision in September 2007 to start speculative work on the 1.8m sq ft Merchant Square, the final phase of the redevelopment, in Paddington Basin.
Jarvis bought his 50% share of Paddington Basin in 2000 for £60m. We can see £18.6m net assets in the European Land & Property joint venture company.
The main Jarvis company, Ravensale, saw its net assets fall slightly in 2010-11 to £13.6m. With the fall in net assets, we clip Jarvis back to £66m.
219= Douglas Woolf & family
£66m
Romulus Holdings
Romulus Holdings, a Leicester-based property group, is owned by Douglas Woolf and his family trusts. It showed £60.9m net assets in 2010-11, when it made £2.1m profit on £12m sales.
It should easily be worth £61m in this economic climate. We add £5m after tax for past salaries and other assets to take the Woolf family to £66m.
221 Mark Knopfler
£65m
Straitjacket
You might be surprised to see music legend Mark Knopfler on this list, but he is moving into property in a big way. He recently purchased the 18,000 sq ft Gagosian Gallery building in central London for £6.3m through an investment vehicle. The price reflected a 7% yield.
Knopfler, the former lead vocalist and guitarist of Dire Straits, was born in Glasgow and grew up in Newcastle.
Since Dire Straits was put on ice in the early 1990s, Knopfler has had some success as a solo artist. His fifth studio album of the decade, Get Lucky, was released in September 2009, and it peaked at 17 in the US charts. Knopfler is also working on a new album and wrote the music for the film, Private Peaceful.
Straitjacket Songs, his company, showed £8m net assets in 2010-11. His touring income is evident in Get Lucky Touring, which showed a £4m profit on
£8m sales in its maiden accounts for 2010.
Knopfler also has some other choice property, including a Chelsea house which he bought in 2010 for more than £9m and has since completely refurbished.
Knopfler sold his six-bedroom home nearby for £7m in 2009, having bought it in 1993 for £1.5m. He is easily worth £65m.
222 Gavin Howard & family
£64m
Howard Investment Co
Gavin Howard has taken over from his late father in this list. The family business started in 1935 delivering coke and coal in the Bedford area. After the war, during which it helped produce gravel for the construction of aircraft runways, the firm moved into new areas, such as building blocks and bridge building.
In 2005, the business relocated to Cambridge and eventually split into two separate operations – Howard Ventures and Howard Investment Co, which are both heavily involved in property and related activities. The two together had more
than £64m net assets in 2011, and we value the Howard family on that.
223= Michael Coates & family
£60m
HW Coates
Michael Coates is chairman of HW Coates, a family-owned property, farming and haulage group based in Leicestershire. In 2011, it made £6m profit on sales of £32.9m, a near 20% return. And with £52.8m net assets on the balance sheet, it is easily worth £53m and probably a lot more.
The family has farming interests through HW Coates and regularly wins prizes when showing its livestock, predominantly bulls, at agricultural shows in the Midlands.
In all, we value the Coates family at around £60m.
223= Melvyn Cooper & family
£60m
Mountcharm
Mel Cooper is known for spotting a bargain, and he showed it in December 2011. His Barnet-based Mountcharm operation bought the Regent Street development in Knutsford, Cheshire, for a reported £7.5m.
The development, which opened in 2007, originally cost £15m and is home to shops and restaurants including Zapatos, Fat Face, Waterstones, Via Via, Loch Fyne and Carphone Warehouse.
Cooper shrewdly sold 90% of Mountcharm’s portfolio in 2005 and 2006 at the top of the market and concentrated on development. But it has returned to the market, buying properties quickly.
In May 2009, for example, Mountcharm completed two deals totalling almost £20m, one of which was agreed in just 24 hours. The net assets of Mountcharm were nearly £50m at the end of 2011. Other smaller company assets add another £4m.
In May 2006, through a company called Pixie, Cooper bought a prestige building in Tel Aviv. He sold it two years later for around double the price. We value the Cooper family at perhaps £60m.
223= The Earl of Radnor
£60m
Ebble Developments
The death of the 8th Earl of Radnor in August 2008 robbed the British aristocracy of one of its most diligent and effective landowners.
During his 40 years running Longford Castle and 10,000 acre estate, Radnor created a farming operation which supplied Sainsbury’s and other retail outlets and, though based in England, his businesses took him to Canada and Australia.
When the Channel Tunnel was constructed, the family property at Folkestone rose considerably in value. He had an art collection which included works by Rubens, Breughel, Van Dyck, Gainsborough and Frans Hals as well as Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, which is on loan to the National Gallery.
There are two small Radnor companies, Ebble Developments and Longford Farms with £2m net assets between them in 2010-11.
These are now run by the 9th Earl who inherited from his father. His inheritance is worth around £60m.
223= Charles & Mary Dobson
£60m
Gainwell
In the 1960s, Charles Dobson was a budding pop star. As Danny Clarke (it sounded better than Dobson) and the Jaguars, he supported the Rolling Stones and recorded at the famous Abbey Road studios.
But the former art college student, who had worked at a sign writing company, wanted to marry and quit the band.
With his wife Mary, he scraped together £600 to launch their own sign business, Spandex. That was in 1976, and 22 years later they sold the Bristol-based firm, netting £58m. They invested in a West End musical in 2004 and indulged some £6m on charity projects through the Starfish Trust.
The couple remain in business with an investment company called Gainwell, which made a huge £2.3m profit on £2.6m of sales in 2010-11, when its net assets came in at £36.4m. The firm has invested in some choice properties and, with other assets, we value the Dobsons at £60m.
223= David Gradel & family
£60m
UK Estates
David Gradel’s family were involved in property development in the North in the 1960s. Gradel, who worked for an American bank, came into the business in the late 1980s and ran UK Estates, a quoted property operation, where the family
had a large stake.
The Gradels eventually took UK Estates private and now, through various trusts, own most of the shares. The firm had £47m net assets in its 2010-11 accounts.
However, the family has significant wealth outside UK Estates, including large property portfolios in Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham.
Gradel’s background was in property, banking and finance; he was a vice-president of US bank Security and Pacific National before taking up his present role
at UK Estates in 1987.
The previous generation of the family shrewdly cut borrowings and sold a lot of property before the crash of the early 1990s. We stick at a £60m valuation.
223= Mark Kay
£60m
Eagle One Investment Holdings
Chartered surveyor Mark Kay is a prominent South West developer who founded the Rockeagle operation in Exeter. His father was a former vice-chancellor of Exeter University.
In 2001, Kay sold the business to the local construction firm EBC in a £14.7m deal and the business was renamed ROK Property Solutions.
Kay joined the board of the quoted group as property director, but he left the company in August 2005 and sold his stake for £14.3m.
At the same time, it was reported that he was suing ROK for what he claimed were unpaid bonuses of £5m. In July 2006, ROK agreed to pay £1.25m in an out-of-court settlement and we add that figure to our calculations.
But Kay also had around £48m of net assets, that we can see, in companies such as Eagle One Investment Holdings and some other smaller firms in 2010-11.
Including other assets, Kay is comfortably a £60m man.
223= John Miskelly
£60m
Pyperhill
Entrepreneur John Miskelly sold his Heathcotes convenience stores chain in September 2011 to the Henderson Group. Though no price was disclosed, Heathcotes had a £16.5m turnover in 2010.
Miskelly has recently opened a new hotel in Downpatrick and also owns the luxury Ten Square Hotel in Belfast. Ten Square is set for a £60m expansion under Miskelly, who bought it in 2008. Miskelly and his wife Helen were credited with saving more than 100 jobs in Downpatrick when they bought the town’s Safeway supermarket. The site, which had been valued at £15m, has now been leased to Asda.
Miskelly has also been busy buying property around Downpatrick and in Germany and England. He has various transport contracts in the public sector as well as a nursing home operation and Miskelly Construction.
He also has four pubs in County Down and on the outskirts of Belfast, and 48 acres of zoned development land in the Belfast and Dublin area.
We can see £1.1m profit on £10.3m sales in the 2010 accounts of Pyperhill, Miskelly’s main holding company. He should still be worth £60m.
223= Raymond Mould
£60m
London & Stamford
Residential property is fast becoming a key component of London & Stamford’s business. The firm, set up by retail and business park investment gurus Raymond Mould and Patrick Vaughan in 2005, began its foray into the sector in 2009. But it is rethinking its strategy. It still wants to raise its residential holdings from 13% of its total portfolio to 20%, but now aims to focus on higher-value, prime London stock.
L&S harbours ambitions to build a portfolio of assets that it could spin off into a residential REIT if legislation is passed. But that will need a portfolio size of between £400m and £700m. L&S is worth £619m.
Mould formed the Arlington Group in 1976. It was sold to British Aerospace for £279m in 1989 and he collected £19m from the sale of his stake. He started again with Pillar Property, which floated on the stock market in 1994. His stake in Pillar was worth £34m when an £811m takeover by British Land was agreed in May 2005.
Mould has an £18m stake in London & Stamford, having sold £2.5m worth of shares in late 2011. With earlier share sale proceeds, and his extensive racing interests, we reckon he is worth £60m.
223= Paul Rooney
£60m
Arun Estate Agencies
Horsham-based Arun Estate Agencies turned in a useful £6.1m profit on £50.5m sales in 2011. With branches across London and the South East, Arun is now the largest independent chain of estate agents in the region. It has added financial services and chartered surveying to its offering.
With nearly £21m of net assets, it is a £50m operation. Past salaries and dividends should take owner Paul Rooney to £60m.
232= Robert Jolly & family
£58m
Limes Developments
Limes Developments is a profitable Lincoln developer which was started in 1986 and is owned by Robert Jolly and his family.
In 2011, it made £2.6m profit on £3.1m sales, but its net assets came in at nearly £45m. The Jolly family also owns the separate Limes Estates with £13m net assets. Limes Developments is particularly good at developing sites for supermarkets and the like in the East Midlands.
In the current economic climate, we value the Jolly family at £58m.
232= Crohan O’Shea & family
£58m
CJ O’Shea Group
Irishman Crohan O’Shea founded London-based CJ O’Shea Group in 1966. It is involved in construction, property development, plant hire and landscaping.
O’Shea is keeping busy, currently undertaking at least 15 projects, including the construction of 639 apartments and retail units in Lanterns Court, east London, 1,000 apartments in Greenwich Reach, Deptford, and much more.
The family-owned operation made a £10.4m profit on £73.5m sales in the 18 months to September 2011, when its net assets came in at £43.7m. With a strong balance sheet, the group should be worth around £53m. Past salaries and other assets in Ireland should take the O’Shea family to £58m.
232= Richard Ross & family
£58m
Regentsmead
Richard Ross has, for the past 20 years, chaired Regentsmead, a property and financial group created in 1934 by his immigrant father, Nathan Rosenbaum. Net assets were £58.5m in 2010-11.
Essentially, Regentsmead is a flexible financial funder to small developers, offering finance where banks have erred.
Ross’s parents established the charity Rosetrees on their golden anniversary to give support to cutting-edge medical research. Donations in 2010-11 were £1m, and a further £1.5m was allocated to seed corn funding, which has led to research grants of £35m. Rosetrees aims to raise £100m for medical research by sharing its expertise with co-donors at no cost.
235= John Elkington
£57m
Penhurst Properties
John Elkington set up Penhurst Properties in 1987 with the purchase of one flat in Tooting. He then focused on acquiring properties in affluent parts of south London during the early 1990s.
There are now some 300 properties in the portfolio, with some let to the Notting Hill Housing Trust, providing secure income. The strong balance sheet shows net assets of £30m. Elkington, 49, owns it all.
There are also three family trusts with substantial property holdings in central London with virtually no borrowings. We value these interests at £15m. Elkington has also taken around £12m in dividends and share buy-backs since 2002. In all, he is easily worth £57m.
235= Amanda Yates & family
£57m
Yates Property Holdings
Amanda Yates is a director of London-based Yates Property Holdings. The 2010-11 accounts show net assets of more than £57m. It is owned by the Yates family and trusts.
Amanda Yates is here representing the wider family. In the current economic climate, we value the business and family on the net assets.
237 Engrez & Palminder Singh Sanghera
£56m
SEP Properties
Engrez and Palminder Singh Sanghera run Wolverhampton-based SEP Properties. Early in 2010, SEP Properties bought the failed Threshers off-licence brand from administrators, along with the Bottoms Up, The Local and Victoria Wine trademarks.
SEP is also busy redeveloping old pubs in the Midlands area. In 2010-11, SEP made a £2m profit and showed £50.1m net assets. With at least another £2m of net assets in smaller companies attributable to the family, we value it at £56m.
238= Elizabeth Abbott & family
£55m
Abbott Bros Holdings
Abbott Bros Holdings, a St Albans-based investment company, made a £1.9m profit and had more than £44m of net assets in 2008-09. However, it was wound up and
put into voluntary liquidation by its directors in late 2009. In its declaration of solvency, it was stated that the firm’s assets were £45.9m and its liabilities just £773,000.
Elizabeth Abbott is a director and represents the family as a whole, who, with their trusts, own all the shares.
The company assets are worth £45.2m. Past dividends and other assets should take the Abbott family to £55m, allowing for tax.
238= Mo Chaudry & Family
£55m
MIC Properties
Born and raised in a remote village in Pakistan, Mo Chaudry moved to Britain in 1969 with his parents and settled in Luton. His family later moved to Telford, where he gained entry to the local grammar school. Over-confidence meant he left with just one O-level, in English literature.
But he made the necessary grades for Staffordshire University, where his natural sporting talent was tested. At the 1982 Student Olympics he won a silver medal for weightlifting and was also a Warwickshire under-19 cricketer.
After university, Chaudry worked in financial services before moving into property. He has also moved into the leisure industry, buying the then loss-making Waterworld theme park from Rank in 1999 for a knockdown price. He has turned it into Stoke’s most popular tourist attraction.
Chaudry has recently taken on a loss-making health and fitness club in Stoke and is in the process of turning it around.
His MIC Properties operation had net assets of around £14.8m at the end of 2011. With other assets, Chaudry is now worth around £55m.
238= Robert Gubbay & family
£55m
Prime Commerrcial Properties
Robert Gubbay runs a family property business, Prime Commercial Properties, with his two sons. It had £33m net assets
in 2010-11. Gubbay qualified as an engineer in Manchester before migrating to Zimbabwe. After starting his own civil engineering company, he moved back to the UK in 1963, where he worked as a district surveyor in London.
Gubbay began his property business in 1966 by converting London houses into apartments. Then, in 1987, he formed Prime Commercial Properties as an investment and asset-management firm specialising in shopping centres.
Other businesses add another £22m of net assets to the Gubbay family.
238= John & Stephen Rosefield
£55m
The Endeavour Company Holdings
John and Stephen Rosefield are directors of Endeavour, a low-key London property group. The Rosefield family and family trusts own Endeavour, which made a below-par £83,000 profit on £7m sales in 2010-11. But its net assets rose to £41.2m.
And its subsidiary, Estates & Agency Holdings, shows £78.2m net assets in the same period. As a result, we value the wider Rosefield family at around £55m.
242 Jeremy Middleton
£54m
Cortonwood 1
Homeserve, the quoted household repair services group, has had a torrid time of late and its shares have fallen sharply. The Midlands-based company was co-founded by North East entrepreneur Jeremy Middleton, who is also a property investor and business angel. He has a Homeserve stake worth £13m.
Other assets include a property company, Cortonwood 1, which has £3.6m of net assets and past dividends of £54m.
Middleton is chairman of the Conservative Party National Convention. Based in the North East, he stood against Peter Mandelson for the Hartlepool seat in the 2004 by-election and, in 1997, unsuccessfully challenged Nick Brown in Newcastle East and Wallsend.
243 Philip Yuill & family
£53m
Modwen Park Estate Compnay
The late Cecil Yuill, a former chimney sweep, founded the Yuill Group in 1927. It now builds 350 luxury homes each year in the North East. The Hartlepool-based firm is also involved in urban regeneration development work and has contracts with councils in the Newcastle area.
Philip Yuill chaired the business, which was taken over by Derry-based Taggart Homes in 2006 for £60m. Sale proceeds, past dividends and other family businesses, such as Modwen Park Estate Company (with net assets up £1m in 2010-11 to £6.4m) take the Yuill family to perhaps £53m, allowing for tax.
244= Kevin Doyle
£52m
Caledonian Heritable
Kevin Doyle’s Caledonian Heritable investment group made £9.75m in October 2010, when it sold its stake in the Betfair betting exchange on its £1.4bn stock market float.
After starting in the building trade, Edinburgh-based Doyle began renovating residential properties and bought property company Caledonian Heritable Estates in 1980. Two years later he bought his first bar and later developed the successful Coronation Inns, which he sold to Scottish & Newcastle in 1990.
Aside from pubs, Doyle has also branched out into plant hire and haulage, and is developing the £55m Archerfield golf and holiday complex in East Lothian.
Doyle owns all of Caledonian Heritable, which made £5m profit on £39.4m sales in 2011. We value the company on its £49m net assets.
We add £3m to Doyle for other assets, including the separate Caledonian Heritable Estates, which had nearly £4m net assets in 2010-11.
244= Mark Dransfield & family
£52m
Dransfield Properties
Dransfield Properties revealed in April its plans for a retail-led development in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, including
a 31,000 sq ft supermarket.
It is also working on a development in Hull covering some 11 acres. Its new award-winning £32m Sanderson shopping mall in Morpeth, Northumberland, confirmed Dransfield’s reputation as one of the North’s leading retail developers.
Dransfield’s other recent projects have included the £39m Gainsborough Marshall’s Yard retail complex. The Barnsley-based operation is run by its managing director Mark Dransfield. Started in 1992, it made £3.3m profit on £22.7m sales in the year to September 2011. We value the business on its near £48m net assets. Other assets take the Dransfield family to £52m.
244= Peter Levy & family
£52m
Shaftesbury
Property company Shaftesbury has recovered in 2010 and 2011 from the property downturn and it is now worth
more than £1.37bn.
Levy, the former Shaftesbury chairman, may have retired, but he will still be interested in what is happening at the company he started in 1986 and built into a leading developer in Covent Garden.
Levy learnt the business from his father, a top developer in the property world in the 1950s and 1960s, through his company, Stock Conversion. That was taken over in the early 1980s, valuing the family stake then at £40m. Levy still has a £10m stake in Shaftesbury. Past share sales, other assets and the Stock Conversion sale keep the Levy family at perhaps £52m.
244= Graham Mellstrom & family
£52m
Glen House Estates
Property tycoon and farmer Graham Mellstrom left school at 16 and started his first business venture just after the war, when milk was rationed. He did a milk round in the morning and trained to be a chartered accountant during the day.
It paid off: his family owns Glen House Estates, a home counties property group which made £2.7m profit and showed £18m net assets in 2011.
Mellstrom also has a 700-acre farm near Bramshott in Hampshire and restored the historic Woolhanger Estate manor house on Exmoor. In 1997, he was beaten by a local syndicate in his efforts to take over the Scottish island of Eigg.
His estates are worth £25m. In addition, an industrial estate and huge cattle station in Australia, plus private assets, take Mellstrom and his family to £52m after allowing for debt.
244= £52m
Michael Slade
Helical Bar
Michael Slade, a veteran property developer and chief executive of London-based Helical Bar, is working through his fourth property downturn. But Slade was shrewd enough to sell investments in 2005 and 2006, reckoning the market boom was ending. He may have been a year early, but Helical Bar ended up as one of the best-placed of quoted property companies.
Slade hails from Port Isaac in Cornwall. Working hard at school and the College of Estate Management to please his parents, he qualified as a chartered surveyor and later dabbled in property overseas.
Slade’s stake in Helical Bar has not been immune from the market crash and it is now worth £26m. His past salaries, share option and dividend gains, stakes in other ventures, such as Europa Property Investments, plus his own property assets should easily take him to £52m after tax.
249 Patrick Vaughan
£51m
London & Stamford
London & Stamford announced in July that it has £600m to invest and that more opportunities are forthcoming, so expect plenty of development plans from the company soon. L&S Property was set up in 2005 by two of the industry’s serial entrepreneurs, Raymond Mould and Patrick Vaughan. Backed by the GE Pension Trust, the company floated on the AIM in late 2007 valued at £248m. Now worth £619m, it is moving into the prime London residential market.
Vaughan and Mould set up the Arlington property firm in 1976 and sold it to British Aerospace for £279m 13 years later. They later ran the Pillar property group – floated in 1994 – which was sold in May 2005 to British Land in an agreed £811m takeover.
Vaughan collected £9m from the sale of his shares in Arlington, followed by another £26m from his shares and options in Pillar. He has a £21m stake in London & Stamford.
Earlier share sale proceeds and past salaries take Vaughan to £51m after tax.
250 Jerry & Janet Knight
£50m
Lexadon
Lexadon, a London-based property operation owned by its directors, husband and wife team Jerry and Janet Knight, bought Clifton Mansions in London’s Lambeth, in April this year for £3.7m.
Jerry Knight left school and went to college to retake A-levels but dropped out. His wife’s brother was a plumber at the time and seemed to be doing well with a good car, so he decided to follow in that trade.
He took up an apprenticeship with a small firm in west London, where he worked for four years. He then met a fellow plumber who played in the same football team and they started Lexadon in 1980.
For the next 18 years Lexadon was active in Clapham and Brixton, buying and converting homes, often problem homes bought at auction from Lambeth council. Knight’s partner left for Australia in 1986.
In 2000, Lexadon moved to work on bigger developments. It retained many of the properties and its net assets came in at £33.2m in 2011.
Other assets and property take the Knights to around £50m.
