BLAIR’S £5M OFFICE
After buying no fewer than 38 homes, it’s...
TONY and Cherie Blair are adding a £ 5million London office to their property empire.
They have taken out a mortgage with the Queen’s bank Coutts to buy the fourstorey Victorian building.
It is their first commercial property, having purchased 38 homes since leaving Downing Street ten years ago.
Mrs Blair will use the office with staff from her organisations including Omnia Strategy and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. A spokesman said: ‘Cherie Blair’s current offices are being re-developed so they have been forced to seek new office space. The most cost-effective way over the long term was to buy this building. There will be no other tenants.’
The former prime minister, 64, and his wife have applied for planning permission to fit glass partitions and make other improvements to the 4,492 sq ft suite of offices. The Blairs are doing the work via their new company, Harcourt Ventures Ltd, set up in March to engage in ‘letting and operating’ properties, according to Companies House records.
The couple are joint owners of the firm,
‘Forced to seek new space’
which lodged three mortgage applications this month with Coutts – one for the office, and the other two relating to unspecified ‘stocks, shares and bonds’.
The building’s previous owner, a company based in the British Virgin Islands, bought it in May 2015 for £4.1million.
The Blair family already owns 38 homes worth an estimated £33million – meaning the total value of their property portfolio is now about £38million.
They have a series of flats in the North West which Mrs Blair, 62, and eldest son Euan, 33, are renting out via their existing company, Oldbury Residential Ltd. Companies House documents show Oldbury held property investments worth £2.4million in the year ending April 2016.
Since early disastrous attempts to play the property market, the Blairs have banked at least £1.7million in profits from nine properties bought and sold. The combined rise in value in the 38 homes they currently own is about £14million.