By his own admission Anthony Butlin has always been lucky with money. "I guess I've got the Midas touch, he says, modestly. "For example, with my premium bonds. I've made about £10,000 in winnings over the years. I'm very fond of premium bonds." He says his interest in saving and investing money stems back to when he was a young man and was influenced by his father, a Royal Navy engineer and keen investor who talked to him about stocks and shares and suchlike. "I guess it rubbed off on me. At 21 I started buying unit trusts, which were all the rage in the late 1960s and the 1970s." Later he began to acquire buy-to-let properties and currently owns four. But that's all a bit last century now. For Butlin, a 58-year-old retired insurance salesman, there's a new game in town. He has become one of England's new breed of land investors. It happened by accident one day two years ago, when he was passing by the Gladwish Land Sales office in his home town of Horsham, West Sussex. "I looked in the window and saw impressive-looking graphs showing how land values had been rising, so I went in out of curiosity. I always thought that to buy land you had to be very rich, which I'm not. When I told them I wanted to invest a mere £2,000 I thought they'd laugh. But they didn't. I bought a tenth of an acre of agricultural land in Oxfordshire for £1,900. Six weeks later I sold it for £2,320, which is almost a 25 per cent return." His second investment, of another, similar Oxfordshire plot, was even more profitable. He bought it for £1,950 and sold it three months later for £3,120. A 60 per cent return. To date he has spent £25,000 on his land portfolio: nine pockets of rural land of either a tenth or a fifth of an acre. These are mainly parts of fields being sold off by farmers to buyers hoping that, because of their location, they will eventually be granted planning permission and consequently rise sharply in value. As well as Oxfordshire, they are in Wiltshire, Norfolk, East Sussex, Devon and Gloucestershire. He has sold five so far, and except for the first one, has made a 60 per cent profit on each sale. "I've never seen any of my plots of land, and haven't a clue what they're like. They're just investments. I don't want to use them for anything. Well, I wouldn't mind sitting on them on a Sunday afternoon, but they're all too far away." His experience bears out the much trumpeted boom in the land market. According to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, although agricultural land prices have fallen by 1 per cent in the past year, they have risen by 170 per cent since the low point reached in first half of 1993. Not surprisingly, land in Greater London and the south east is the most expensive, and the cheapest is in the North and Wales. In the UK as a whole, residential land prices have risen from an average of £174,000 a hectare 20 years ago to £1.6m today - an increase of 808 per cent, outstripping the housing market. Most sought-after by investors are greenfield sites near to existing residential or already developed land with good infrastructure, amenities and road communications. These sites could be considered for planning permission in the near future under John Prescott's extensive new housebuilding push. An acre of such land costs from £15,000 - and if it receives planning permission - it could suddenly be worth well over ten times more to a property developer. This has prompted hordes of land agents over the past couple of years to sell off bits of the countryside to investors on this highly speculative basis. But the truth is that this is a high-risk gamble. Councils are notoriously averse to redesignating greenfield land into development land, and precious few private investors have made a killing this way. But Butlin is not speculating for a potential long-term gain if planning permission is granted. His approach is to take shorter term gains, selling on to other investors. So in effect he is a land trader rather than a land investor. "All my plots are agricultural and I don't expect them to get planning permission. I don't care about making a fifteen-fold profit on them. My plots are kept permanently on the market, and it doesn't matter if I sell them quickly or hold on to them for the long term. For me, land investment is merely a nice way to supplement the pension which I started drawing at the age of 50." Butlin believes land values will continue to go up. He buys and sells only through Gladwish. "The owner Victor Gladwish has been in the business for 20 years, is experienced and very straight. He never makes false promises." Unlike some of the new boys who, judging by their slick websites, promise investors the earth - literally and metaphorically. In the meantime, Butlin is enjoying the fruits of his land profits. "I've just returned from a great trip to New York," he enthuses. "I sailed out there on the Queen Mary 2, and stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. Afternoon tea at the Waldorf. Wonderful." |
