2nd March 2008
Builder's Breakfast
In a market where amateur investors are pulling back, it is refreshing to meet a man who is willing put his money where his mouth is. Rupert Bates talks to buy-to-let entrepreneur, Grant Bovey.
One colleague dared me to arrive at Richmond Lock to interview buy-to-let tycoon Grant Bovey brandishing a Flake. Another said she’d happily munch, in public, any type of confectionery from mini Mars bars to giant Toblerones if it helped pay for her wedding.
Builder’s Breakfast is confusing. Bovey is not a builder - yet – and the finest steaks this side of Las Pampas at the Argentine restaurant the Gaucho Grill in Richmond, Surrey, were very much lunch fare, not breakfast.
You may have missed the tabloid feeding frenzy of eight years ago, which was the marriage Grant Bovey to former golden girl of television Anthea Turner – a classic tittle-tattle tale of celebrity and adultery that sadly shifts some papers in droves. OK! Magazine, which bought the rights to their wedding, then released pictures of the couple tucking into Flakes, although they denied it was part of a Cadbury’s deal.
I was prepared to tiptoe round the episode, but Bovey confronts it head on: “Flake Gate. I’m the first to admit I’ve made mistakes, but I was ridiculed and persecuted in the papers. It was deeply upsetting because it portrayed me as someone I am not. I had no chance to defend myself. I rode it out.”
And how. Although being a risk taker of the highest order, you still suspect Bovey should tighten those saddle bags a little, so fast is he now riding with his buy-to-let firm Imagine Homes, coupled with its bespoke customer service business Imagine Private clients.
Before we look at the business Bovey has built, let us remind those still not familiar with the name of another reason you might remember his face, this one portraying him in a far more flattering light. Six years ago for charity Bovey had a televised boxing bout with comedian Ricky Gervais, with real blood, sweat, tears and gum shields shed as the two were given professional training before slugging it out for real in the ring. “I was beaten up for six weeks, but my public persona changed overnight and I was no longer Anthea Turner’s husband.”
Armed with a bucket load of preconceptions, I was expecting to meet a bit of a prat. The man I did meet was a top bloke, if a tad manicured for this industry, with a passion for property. Enough of the minor celebrity stuff and down to business – and it is a significant business. First the facts and figures. Bovey founded the Imagine Group nearly five years ago as a buy-to-let specialist, and now buys developer stock ahead of completion, before selling the majority of the units to investors, who are then given a guaranteed rental income of 7.5 percent for the first two years, with Imagine finding and managing tenants.
With another company called Veritas, a joint venture with HBOS, Bovey has around £250 million in investment equity, and Imagine holds onto a percentage of the developer stock. “We acquire £500 million of property a year and the portfolio is currently exclusively UK. I find it odd that no major housebuilder has created a buy-to-let brand like us, considering it represents a significant percentage of their turnover,” said Bovey, with a flotation of the company expected soon.
It sounds like an industry challenge – and it is. “ Housebuilding is a very complacent industry, which does very well by not trying too hard. It lacks innovation. “I can think of a few builders pebble-dashing their walls with crumbly and flaky milk chocolate bar on hearing that rather sweeping generalisation.
Many still seem quite happy to offload their properties to Bovey, from six months to two years ahead of completion. “Publicly-listed companies want to record transactions at certain times. By selling to Imagine at an early stage their results are far more favourable.” Said Bovey, adding that it saves on sales and marketing costs, and let’s developers free up stock and reinvest elsewhere. “I’m offered three sites a day but am careful about where to invest. Will I ever build myself? It requires a very different skill set but never say never.”
Bovey conceived Imagine on a flight home from Dubai, after failing in an attempt to launch a project on the short-term lettings market in the Emirate. But Dubai has since served him well, and he has an office there to cater for the Middle Eastern investors in the market for UK buy-to-let properties.
“My only knowledge of property at the time was personal experience and frustration. But I believe I have created a reputable brand, with customer service essential. The way the UK consumer is treated is poor. This is why Imagine Private Clients was born.”
Bovey’s right hand man is group marketing director Keith Scarratt, who describes Imagine Private Clients as “offering a Coutts Private banking style service.”
Scarratt, former managing director of Peter Knight’s agency Phoenix, had worked with Bovey before. A few years ago Scarratt popped in for coffee at Imagine’s Farnborough head office and the pair were back doing business. Imagine currently has around 1,400 units to manage, while Imagine Furnishings, where Anthea Turner, who dressed the showhome at Richmond Lock, is heavily involved, is turning over £7 million a year.
Buy-to-let is always flagged as a barometer of the property market. Many investors who have bought new build in overcooked city centres are struggling to find tenants and feeling the heat, with auctions now full of repossessions.
Bovey however remains sanguine. He probably has little choice. “There are naturally a lot of nerves about, but buy-to-let will get bigger.” Bovey, through Veritas, will always hold onto a few flats he has invested in, thus remaining an investor as well as a trader.
His confidence is a by-product of developer nerves. With the new buy-to-let market a different animal to second-hand, Bovey knows the house building industry has targets to meet and year ends writ large in diaries.
Imagine’s portfolio covers anything from the boutique development of The Cheyne Apartments at Chelsea Wharf including an £8 million apartment that costs £600,000 to furnish, to one-bedroom apartments on a historic mill site in Shipley, West Yorkshire. The company expects to sell more than 800 units in the current financial year and forecasts turnover of £285 million.
The show house at Richmond Lock, the old Brunel University site, with is actually St. Margaret’s, not Richmond, is a testimony to the attention to detail and luxury at the heart of Imagine philosophy. Richmond Lock, acquired from Octagon a couple of phases in, won Gold in the Best Landscape Design category of the 2007 What House? Awards.
The show home has all the toys from commissioned photographs of Richmond to a pop-up television at the end of the bed, and the now de rigueur home cinema room. I was more impressed by the bowl of jelly babies in the drawing room. A tabloid hack might have focused on a book in the bedroom called “Shaggy Dog and the terrible itch.”
Bovey started business in Nottingham in the rag trade, selling ladies’ fashion retail. He beats you to it. “A great way to meet the ladies.” He then headed to London to seek his fortune and buying films and television production company followed. Work with the Football Association and a professional footballer’s database fuelled his passion for the sport and Bovey is a Chelsea season ticket holder. His work in football and his Nottingham background bought him into contact with the late, great Brian Clough, who referred to the young Bovey as ‘Beau Brummell.”
Imagine’s latest innovation is opening a show room by the Hogarth roundabout in West London. It will have all the interactive, hi-tech gizmos, but will also be a walk-in information mine about UK cities ripe or not for investment, with details on capital growth and rental yields, as well availability and an auditorium for presentations.
Passing punters can learn about the markets in Liverpool, Birmingham or wherever and whether they are good, bad or ugly to invest in. “We are not into short-term selling- and will tell it how it is whether we have a portfolio in a particular area or not.”
Imagine’s residential portfolio is one of the biggest in the UK. Is Bovey heading to fall? Those who do not know him, but think they do from the tabloids, hope he is. Those who do wish this high-wire entrepreneur the very best of luck.