Will it be my turn to beat the bailiff? BBC1′s debt collector star tells how he fell victim to the crash
0 Comments | Mail on Sunday (London, England), The, July 25, 2010
Byline: Mark Anstead
PELARGONIUM Britain’s best-known debt collector, Jamie Waller, star of BBC1′s Beat The Bailiff, may soon be in danger of receiving a visit from the bailiffs himself. A multimillion-pound development he has been building in the market town of Faringdon, Oxfordshire, has run out of steam and the banks won’t lend to him any more.
Like many other property developers, Jamie initially agreed a facility to borrow 70 per cent of the projected value in stages as he went along. But following the 2008 property crash, Jamie’s bank downgraded the final value, leaving him in a situation where the money he had already borrowed was the new maximum allowed.
Jamie was constructing what he had hoped would be a [pounds sterling]2.5million six-bedroom home but now he must choose between two options. Either he will sell his unfinished project at just over half his target price or he will invest more of his own money and wait for the market to recover.
‘But neither of those options will bring me the money I had hoped to make here,’ says Jamie, 31.
‘And I went through a long planning battle just to get to this stage, so it’s going to be quite hard to give up, but it would cost me another [pounds sterling]300,000 to finish and I’m not sure it’s worth it.’ In 2006 Jamie, who runs his own bailiff company, JBW Group, bought a former RAF water-pumping station in Faringdon for [pounds sterling]440,000 at auction. The five-acre plot came with planning permission for a three-bedroom home but Jamie reckoned there was scope for something grander.
During the next 18 months he put in four different proposals for a sixbedroom house. The site lies down a long unmade road and is not overlooked, but his proposals were rejected on the grounds that a public bridleway runs near it and a larger house would spoil the countryside views.
‘I kept asking what the planners would be willing to consider, but no one would tell me,’ he says. ‘Thankfully I had been alerted to a previous planning permission that was still in force, and in the end I hired planning lawyers to establish that I could start work under it.’
The earlier permission allowed the owner to cover up to half the entire plot with a single-storey dwelling.
Jamie hatched a plan to build three buildings – a main three-bedroom house on two storeys (which he had permission for when he bought the plot), a single-storey block of bedrooms and a separate indoor swimming pool, only applying to link them when they were completed. With Jamie having since spent [pounds sterling]400,000 on building works the house is complete, with a large kitchen diner, a single-storey living room and attractive vaulted ceilings in all three bedrooms. But the swimming pool is merely a hole under a steel frame in the garden, and what should be the other three bedrooms are an unconverted outbuilding.
‘Initially the project was valued on the basis of drawings at [pounds sterling]2.6million and I arranged a loan to draw up to 70 per cent against that at key stages,’ says Jamie. ‘As the development progressed the bank revised the valuation, and finally I ran out of money. I want to sell, but not for less than [pounds sterling]1.3million.’ According to Anthony Coker, residential sales manager at Savills in Cirencester, Jamie is unlikely to find demand for an unfinished development particularly strong at the moment.
‘There has always been a shortage of stock and high demand in this area,’ says Anthony, ‘but right now there is very limited appetite for taking on an unfinished project. I would advise him to finish first.
‘Our sales are up, but we have only seen prices recovering to near peak values in cases where property for sale is immaculate. Anything blighted by road noise, pylons or nearby eyesores will only sell for around 15 per cent less than peak value price at the moment.’
Jamie hopes to sell privately
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