They built up a £180m property empire in buy-to-let boom but now the suburban tycoons are selling up ... do they know something we don't?
By LAURA POWELL
This certainly doesn’t look like the stately pile of a billionaire. There’s no gold jacuzzi, no personal tanning salon (like Simon Cowell), no £16 million private jet (like Sir Philip Green), not even a Rolls-Royce (like Del Boy).
The only indication that the owners have a bob or two - as I pull up the gravel drive of an unremarkable suburban house in Boughton Monchelsea, near Maidstone, Kent - is the tired-looking Jaguar X-Type outside.
Even this, however, is parked next to a battered old Land Rover. So battered, in fact, that the wing mirrors are attached with sticky tape.
It is hard to believe that this is the home - albeit the second home and office - of Judith and Fergus Wilson, proud owners of a £180million property empire.
Humble: Judith and Fergus Wilson aren't bothered about spending their millions
In fact, their fortune probably peaked at a staggering £250 million - although that doesn’t stop property experts labelling them Britain’s first buy-to-let billionaires.
They even overtook the Beckhams in the 2007 Sunday Times Husbands And Wives Rich List.
But you couldn’t tell from their lifestyles. They haven’t holidayed for more than 20 years - ‘Why would we want to leave Kent?’ - they shop at the local supermarket, and even their choice of biscuits, Rich Tea, is rather humble.
But they are now planning their biggest luxury to date: retirement.
Yes, property prices are up almost 8 per cent since March, and estate agents are urging budding landlords to buy now to cash in on rising rental prices - but the Wilsons have had enough.
And so the couple, who own between 700 and 900 houses - Fergus hasn’t counted recently - along the M20 corridor in Kent, are selling their entire portfolio. Which is rather worrying, given that Fergus ‘watches property like other men watch the football scores’ and that their acumen is so astute that they have made six people millionaires through their advice alone.
So is there something they’re not telling us? And is the future of the property market rather dicier than we have been led to believe?
‘Why we’re retiring now is no big secret,’ says Fergus, solemnly. ‘I’d happily keep going, but Judith tells me I can’t rule from the grave, so we have to sell at some point. And right now isn’t a bad time to sell.
‘The difference between interest rates and rent prices will never be as good as it is now so if we sell, we’ll make more profit than we will any other time in the near future.’
Fergus, 61, is also adamant that their fortune has stood relatively steady against the recession. In fact, he believes that as their properties appreciate, their wealth is increasing by a mind-blowing £70,000 a day.
After buying their first houses in 1986, the Wilsons rode the boom until 2003 when they hit their peak and amassed 180 houses in one year - mainly two and three- bedroom properties with neat front lawns and magnolia paintwork.
They finally stopped buying in May, after bagging one final bargain: a detached house in Ashford that no one else would buy because ‘it was painted silly colours’.
Hidden gold: House prices have gone up 8% since March as rents are rising
Now, if they sell their portfolio for the £180million asking price, after paying off their meagre borrowing debt (£45million) and taxes, they will retire with a cosy nest-egg of around £100million.
Not bad for a couple who began life with barely two pennies to rub together.
They were so hard up, in fact, that 40 years ago, while he was a student, Fergus slept rough in Greenwich Park.
Later, they both worked as maths teachers in a South London comprehensive and survived on £200 a week.
But while they are now set to enjoy the fruits of their labours, Fergus is terrified by the prospect of the empty days ahead of him. As a result, the Wilsons’ idea of retirement now sounds like rather a lot of hard work.
For 59-year-old Judith, retirement means a few spare hours to make crab apple jelly, ‘and do the things old ladies like to do’ in between juggling other business ideas.
Meanwhile, Fergus, a self-confessed insomniac who wakes at 3.30am sharp, wants to direct a handful of property companies, dabble with a television show - a sort of The-Apprentice-meets-Dragons’-Den - and even buy a couple of farms to breed cattle.
Even more peculiar is that Fergus seems more intent on losing money during his retirement than enjoying it.
‘I wanted to get rich, but when I did acquire wealth, it didn’t really mean anything. I mean, what can you do with it? Everyone is buying houses and we’re selling them. So farming is a good option because it eats money!’
After spending an afternoon with the ‘billionaires’, it’s not hard to see why they find it so difficult to spend - not only because of their penchant for 38p packets of biscuits and somewhat battered cars - but because they appear to have absolutely no interest in the trappings of wealth.
First, Fergus kindly insists on collecting me personally from Maidstone East station. ‘I’ll call a taxi,’ I say. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says, adamant.
Then, when I arrive at their home, Judith clucks about like a kindly grandmother, not the woman who spearheaded the Judith Wilson Property Investment Bond scheme and whose name is on the deeds of hundreds of properties.
‘Let me take your coat dear. . . tea? How many sugars? Tuck into the biscuits or he’ll eat them all.’
‘In the pecking order, I come about number 38,’ Fergus says.
‘I come after Judith’s six dogs, 12 horses, seven cats, four budgies, even her nine finches. After they’ve all been fed, I’m fed.’
That’s a little hard to believe.
She replenishes the tea in Fergus’s ‘Cool Dude’ mug, straightens his collar and tie and makes sure he has enough Rich Tea.
Next, she ushers me to the sitting room, filled with paintings of horses, ornaments of pigs, a stray bottle of creme de menthe, and clashing multi- coloured floral wallpaper that I suspect has been on the walls since the Seventies — before they even bought the house.
It’s easy to see why fellow racing pundits — the Wilsons’ racehorse, Cerium, came fifth in the Grand National this year — have labelled them ‘eccentric’. The most fitting nickname of the lot — for Fergus at least — is surely Del Boy.
Fifty years ago, Fergus was already wheeling and dealing. Aged 10, he earned pocket money by pushing wheelbarrows around an Essex building site.
As a teenager, he made a bob or two sparring and boxing. He earned £2,000 with a home-made Tshirt printing business when he was a student at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Instead of ironing on each of the prints individually, he worked out a way of printing en masse in a borrowed baker’s oven.
Then, when he married Judith, they rented a four-storey house in Blackheath, South London, and sublet the lower three storeys to other couples at a price that covered the Wilsons’ own rent.
‘I thought that was good business at the time, but I’d never do that now,’ says Fergus. Cheekily, he adds: ‘Now, I’d rent each storey for even more money — I’d live there rentfree and make a profit!’
They met as maths students at Goldsmiths, ironically, during one of Fergus’s business ventures.
‘Everyone else walked around with brightly-coloured dyed hair, but we were standard mathematicians — absolute squares. I was working on my T-shirt stall when Judith came over and asked if I had a T-shirt in her size.
‘I liked the look of this girl. She was wearing Dame Edna glasses, which I thought made her look quite intellectual. So I told her I didn’t have a T-shirt in her size, but I had one in my bedroom!’
Within a year, they were married — and soon had two daughters, Samantha, now 40, and Tanya, 37.
Few people know that Fergus began to design dream homes using Weetabix boxes. Judith also started to collect Lilliput Lane houses, plaster cast miniatures of stately homes.
Then, in 1975, they bought a three-bedroom house for £8,000, just down the road from the house we are sitting in, which doubles as an office.
They still own that first house and rent it out — ‘We never sell anything, my dear’ — but these days, it is valued at £320,000. They clearly have a gift for this sort of thing.
All the while, they kept buying investment properties on interest-only mortgages.
‘There are certain rules that I have set and stuck to,’ says Fergus. ‘First, I always painted them magnolia.
'Second, I made sure all business letters fitted on one side of A4 paper — even if it meant shrinking the font and margins. And I tended not to buy flats.
'They’re like battery farming people. If I’d invested in those instead of houses, I’d commit suicide. You can quote me on that.’
Between slurps of tea and demolishing more Rich Teas, he taps a foot and bounces his knee. He is still not used to sitting still and can’t tolerate televisions.
‘Put me in front of one and I’ll fall asleep,’ he says.
Until recently, he filled sleepless nights working as a nightwatchman, guarding his own house because the man recruited for the job — one of just 14 staff on his books — was scared of the dark.
Right now, though, Fergus is waiting. Waiting to see whether the potential buyers — the Russians, Bulgarians, Saudis, Chinese, Japanese or Indians who have all expressed interest — will buy the entire Wilson portfolio in one go.
Sometimes he spends hours playing ‘pattacake’ with his guard dogs. He doesn’t respond when I ask whether the buzz of buying has dried up. No doubt, after nearly 900 houses, it has.
Besides, he has seen all walks of life pass through his rental houses: ‘six murders, battered wives, sometimes battered husbands.’
Twice a week, newspapers and television crews visit and he recites the same old anecdotes about his childhood — sometimes word for word. He has, it seems, become a little jaded, a little cynical.
But he really opens up when the photographer arrives and Judith comes back into the room.
‘I’m not putting my arm around you,’ he jokes.
‘Oi, cheeky, maybe I don’t want to put my arm around you!’ Judith ripostes.
And with that, he picks her up, right off the floor, until she shrieks. Later, Fergus tells me: ‘Judith’s the only one who’ll put up with me, now.’
‘Have you any hobbies?’ I ask him. ‘We don’t socialise much. It’s just me and Judith most of the time.’
Then he adds, in all seriousness: ‘As for other hobbies, being a landlord. Really, it’s just a hobby that got out of hand.’
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