Cameron’s brother-in-law and the toxic leasehold scandal
His family has owned some of Britain’s great houses. How bitterly ironic he’s being accused of preying on struggling homeowners
FrANKLy, it’s a safe bet that the Honourable William Waldorf Astor IV and his wife Lohralee, a toothsome former model, are untroubled by the property worries that keep most thirtysomething parents awake at night.
The clue’s in the name. Will, as he is known to his chums, is a member of the ludicrously rich and influential Astor clan, which is synonymous with grand houses, high-grade scandal and, of course, all that lovely money.
When it comes to family homes, Will and Lohralee are spoiled for choice.
Like many young couples, they and their three children often spend weekends with the grandparents, though visits decidedly do not involve cramming themselves into a poky spare room.
His mother and father — the fourth Viscount Astor is, confusingly, also named William — have plenty of space at their sprawling 17thcentury pile, Ginge Manor in Oxfordshire.
For a bit of shooting and fishing, there is William Snr’s property on the Hebridean island of Jura, though the 19,000-acre Tarbert Estate is not technically owned by the Viscount but by a company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
Will and Lohralee own a townhouse in a smart part of West London, bought for £3.3 million in 2014. It’s conveniently close to the home of Samantha Cameron, his halfsister from their mother Annabel’s earlier marriage to baronet Sir reginald Sheffield.
That, of course, makes the very wellconnected Will half-brother-in-law to Sam Cam’s husband David Cameron. One can almost imagine the Bullingdon boy former PM calling him ‘bro’.
Land registry records suggest the young Astors are in the enviable position of owning the West London freehold property outright, with no mortgage.
But there is a shadow looming over this seemingly charmed life.
For 38-year-old Will is accused of being one of the villains in a leasehold rip-off scandal that threatens to be as big and bitter as the multi-billion-pound PPI mis-selling outrage.
Complaints about leaseholds have been simmering for several years but are now threatening to boil over and embarrass the boyish-looking aristocrat. THE
alleged victims are modest families who have struggled to get a foot on the property ladder, only to find they do not really own their homes, because the freehold has passed into the hands of rich, faceless investors.
Ministers this week announced they are drawing up plans to outlaw the sale of new houses with the hated leases. The Department for Communities and Local Government said it is launching a consultation on a ban. ‘It’s unacceptable that home buyers are being exploited,’ a spokesman said.
A halt on future leasehold house sales, while welcome, wouldn’t help people who say their lives have already been blighted.
One of them is Katie Kendrick. Her life is, to say the least, far removed from the elevated social sphere adorned by William Astor.
She is a nurse who puts in gruelling 13-hour shifts caring for sick children. But there is no respite when she finally leaves the hospital and gets home to the £214,000 four-bed house in Cheshire she shares with her husband Steve, 52, and their five-year-old son.
Instead, Katie, 37, worries over whether she can afford to buy the freehold to her property from its current owners, who are investors in a fund run by one of Will Astor’s firms.
To understand her plight and to grasp why Will Astor and his ilk stand accused of exploiting home-buyers, it is necessary to explain how freeholds and leaseholds work. Simply put, if you buy a freehold property, then you own the building and the land it stands on, outright. This is not the case for purchasers of a leasehold property.
Tens of thousands of house owners such as Katie have found, to their dismay, that with a leasehold, you don’t truly own your home: you merely have a contract allowing you the use of it for a set period of years.
The owner is the person or company that is the freeholder of the property. They are entitled to demand charges, including an annual fee for ‘ground rent’. These can be onerous: in some cases, contracts have been written so ground rents double every decade.
Freeholders also often demand fees to approve alterations or improvements to a home. On top of that, there may be steep yearly payments to a ‘managing agent’, often appointed by the freeholder, who is charged with looking after the building.
It’s been common for many years for flats to be sold as leasehold, and property experts say there is a logic to this as there are common areas which need to be maintained.
Houses, however, have traditionally been freehold. That was until bright sparks in the City woke up to the fact that if they could get their hands on freeholds to newly built houses, they would represent an almost limitless cash cow.
Big stockmarket- listed building firms
including the likes of Taylor Wimpey and Bellway have been quick to cash in by selling tens of thousands of new houses on leasehold deals.
In other words, they have been hanging onto valuable freeholds — that in the past automatically had gone to housebuyers — and using them for their own profit.
As a consequence, home-buyers claim they are being forced to pay unfair charges that can run into thousands of pounds. And when they try to end their misery by buying the freeholds, they say they are faced with demands for extortionate sums.
huge numbers of people are potentially affected by leasehold rip-offs. Around 40 per cent of all new-build homes in 2015 were leasehold, according to Land registry figures, almost double the proportion 20 years ago.
In certain parts of the country, including in the North West where nurse Katie Kendrick lives, locals report it is virtually impossible to buy a new house with a freehold — they are almost all on a lease.
Theoretically, the homeowner can later request to buy the freehold, but this is by no means always straightforward, as we shall see.
sebastian O’Kelly, director of campaign group the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, says: ‘Between £300 million and £500 million of freeholds are sold on by developers every year. This is a murky business, it is the housebuilding industry’s dirty secret.’
having seized these lucrative assets, the building firms frequently sell them on to big investors, including pension funds and City institutions — which is where Will Astor enters the picture. He
Is the chief executive of an investment firm called Long harbour, which has bought up around 160,000 freeholds on behalf of investors in one of its funds, which has £1.2 billion of assets (though not all are related to freeholds). Long harbour says the freeholds are mainly on flats, not houses.
Mr Astor is also a director of homeGround, which manages the freeholds. It raked in nearly £3 million of revenues from freeholders and made more than £330,000 profit in 2015, according to its most recent accounts.
Katie says that when she bought her property from developer Bellway in ellesmere Port in 2014, she was told she would be able to buy the freehold after two years for £2,000-£4,000.
But Bellway subsequently sold a chunk of freeholds, including the one on Katie’s house, to a firm called Adriatic, where Mr Astor used to be a director. Adriatic is owned by one of the funds in his Long harbour group.
she approached homeGround, where Mr Astor is a director, to buy the freehold on her house and was told the price would be £13,350 — far more than she can afford. That has since been knocked down to £7,680, but she says it is still too much and is considering going to a tribunal.
unsurprisingly campaigners want to see an end to these leaseholds on houses, which they say are exploitative.
‘It is rather distasteful that a monied member of the Astor family is preying on modest homebuyers,’ says sebastian O’Kelly. ‘It is just a version of what aristocrats did hundreds of years ago, trying to make themselves rich through land grabs.’
Katie says friends and neighbours on her estate are in a similar position. A Facebook group for leaseholders has more than 2,700 members all expressing their anger at various freehold companies.
‘I had no idea the builders were allowed to sell to a third party,’ Katie says simply.
A spokesman for homeGround said leaseholders such as Katie have the right to buy freeholds and that the company could often informally negotiate a price ‘which can often save both time and some of the professional fees’.
since he set up Long harbour in 2010, Will Astor has become Britain’s second biggest operator in the freehold investment management game.
he cut his teeth working for six years for yacht-loving playboy Vincent Tchenguiz, whose Consensus Business Group is thought to be the largest operator, with a portfolio of 300,000 residential freeholds worth around £4 billion.
Perhaps to someone like Will Astor, the £13,350 Katie Kendrick was asked to pay for her freehold sounds like a tiny sum. After all, he is the scion of dynasty estimated in the sunday Times rich list to be worth £210 million.
The residence for which they are most famous is, of course, Cliveden, scene of the infamous Profumo affair, where the government minister first set eyes on Christine Keeler by the swimming pool. BY
AsTOr standards, then, the description of Will’s brother in society magazine Tatler as ‘superhot Jake the snake with alarmingly tight trousers’ is tame, as were the pictures of Jake’s wife Victoria clutching a giant inflatable phallus at her hen night.
No doubt that was just good clean fun. sam Cam, however, is likely to have been unamused when her stepfather — Will’s dad — was revealed to have had an affair with a young single woman called rachel Whetstone, now a spin doctor at controversial minicab company uber and formerly a senior executive for tax-shy search engine company Google.
Whetstone, many years the frolicsome Viscount’s junior, is now married to steve hilton, who was at one time a key member of david Cameron’s chumocracy.
Before he settled down, etoneducated Will is said to have kissed My Fair Lady actress Martine McCutcheon at a party and was briefly engaged to lawyer Nina Moaddel, both of whom are, like his wife, glossy brunettes.
For the former Lohralee stutz, who has swiss nationality but was brought up in suburban Vancouver, marrying Will was, if not exactly rags to riches, still a fairytale union.
she started out as a model aged just 18 and worked in ad campaigns for diesel and Lee Jeans, reaching the pinnacle of her modelling career as Canada’s diet Coke girl.
In the Noughties, she moved to
London, where she continued modelling while studying nutrition. It was on the dance floor at Raffles nightclub on the King’s Road in Chelsea where she first caught the eye of her future husband.
These days, Lohralee describes herself as a nutritionist, author, health junkie, foodie, wife, mother and poodle-obsessed animal lover. Already a mother of three children, Waldorf, Allegra and Conrad, ‘No 4 is well on its way’, according to one of her recent Instagram posts.
While her family life sounds little short of idyllic, that’s not the case for many families struggling to cope with large demands to buy the freehold on their own homes.
Katie Kendrick says she is looking to the future with trepidation. ‘It’s very stressful,’ she says. ‘I don’t want my home to be someone else’s cashpoint for the rest of my life.’
Any ban on future sales of leasehold houses is too late for Katie. But veteran Tory Sir Peter Bottomley, the MP for West Worthing, says investors should be forced to offer leaseholders the right to buy the freehold to their home at the price the investor paid, plus inflation.
‘At the moment they can ask any price they like. Leaseholders can go to a tribunal but that costs thousands of pounds. The gravy train needs to stop.’
He said he is considering a complaint to the competition authorities to force investors to offer leaseholders fair terms.
Katie’s MP, Labour’s Justin Madders, who says the scandal could be as big as PPI misselling, invited Will Astor to meet leaseholders in his constituency.
‘For people like him it is just business, but it’s about people’s real lives and emotions, not just money.’
If he does agree to meet disgruntled leaseholders, Katie Kendrick and her neighbours will tell him that a home is more than just a number in someone else’s investment portfolio.
That’s regardless of whether it’s a stately mansion — or just a humble semi.