ISLAND LIFE
The rush to buy islands has been a global phenomenon among the super-rich, and Scottish island estates are among the most popular, finds
Join the ultra-exclusive club of Scottish island owners
‘ The world has been changed dramatically by Covid,’ says Cameron Ewer, head of Scottish residential property for Savills. ‘People now want space and they want seclusion, and they’re prepared to pay a premium for both of those things. If money is no object, what better way to get that space and seclusion than to have an estate on an island? Or, better still, to buy the whole island so that you own all that you can see.’
The cachet of owning a Scottish island is nothing new. Industrialist Lord Leverhulme paid the then fantastically large sum of £203,000 to buy Lewis and Harris immediately after the First World War, while the mega-rich Victorian socialite Sir George Bullough almost bankrupted himself developing the island of Rum. But recently there has been something of an arms race when it comes to buying one of Scotland’s 93 inhabited islands, with the unfeasibly wealthy lining up to snap up their own personal paradise.
No-one is more aware of this than Ewer, who recently conducted what turned out to be a ‘frenzied’ sale of Inchonnachan on Loch Lomond, one of the 300 uninhabited Scottish islands over 50 acres. The island does have its upsides: it is near to Glasgow, it comes with planning permission and is famously home to Scotland’s only troupe of wallabies. But at less than 90 acres, with no house, and with restrictive planning conditions that say an owner cannot live there for more than 30 days a year, it should not have been worth much more than the £90,000 paid last year for another Loch Lomond island, the 14-acre Creinch Island, where development of any kind is prohibited.
Instead, put on the market at £500,000, Inchonnachan attracted 16 offers – many of them over £1 million, and several sight unseen – and eventually sold for £1.5m to a London-based businessman as a present for his Scottish wife. By the time a house is built on Inchconnachan, the price tag will be around £2.5m for a property its new owners can stay in for just one month each year.
‘There is now a growing market for Scottish islands, which are going for around three times as much as they were before Covid,’ says Ewer. ‘Take the island of Shuna near Port Appin, which is 383
acres. It was sold to a European buyer for £1.6 million in 2012, and if it was to go to market today I would expect to get around £5m for it.’
The rush to buy islands has been a worldwide phenomenon amongst the mega-rich. Farhad Vladi, founder of Vladi Private Islands, says that enquiries have tripled since Covid-19 hit compared with the same period in 2019, while shipbuilding giant Ferretti Group is now building superyachts so big that it describes them as ‘portable private islands’. Last year, without ever setting foot on it a European buyer paid over £5m for Horse Island, a 157-acre island off Ireland’s southwest coast which boasts three beaches and seven houses.
If anything, the Scottish market is even more overheated. ‘Bargains’ are in short supply, so when the uninhabited 11-acre Deer Island in Loch Moidart was put up for sale earlier this year it attracted 145 bids and went for £311,000, almost four times its £80,000 asking price. There is no prospect of planning permission and the new owners are not even allowed to camp there for more than 30 days a year.
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‘For sale at £500,000, Inchconnachan eventually sold for £1.5m to a London-based businessman as a present for his Scottish wife’ |
At every level of the market there has been a huge amount of activity as super-rich owners buy island estates. The most high-profile is hedge fund billionaire Greg Coffey’s purchase of 11,500-acre Ardfin, one of just six estates on the remote isle of Jura. The Australian, who was nicknamed The Wizard of Oz after making a reputed £430m as a young City hedge fund trader, bought Ardfin for £3.5m in 2010 and has since spent an estimated £20m on the fabric of the estate, tripling Jura House in size and converting farm buildings for habitation, plus investing a reported £50m on a Championship-quality golf course which is already rated among the best 100 courses in the world.
After initially seeing Ardfin as a possible home, Coffey, who travels with an IT department so that he can trade from anywhere in the world, has instead turned the estate into one of the most high-spec and exclusive golf resorts anywhere in the world, with guests paying up to £20,000 for a night at Jura House. The whole enterprise is overseen by Beppo Buchanan-Smith, the man who turned the Isle of Eriska Hotel into a Michelin-starred destination, with his Australian boss spending up to three months a year living on the island.
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‘Vanessa Branson owns the idyllic Eilean Shona in Lochaber’ |
Coffey has turned out to be a trailblazer for City billionaires seeking seclusion, although for some living remotely is a fulltime vocation. For instance, former Goldman Sachs partner Christian Siva-Jothy, an amateur helicopter pilot and City trader with an almost mythical status, now runs his £1.25bn company CSJ Capital from the four-bedroomed house he shares with his wife on the island of Eilean Righ (which translates in Gaelic as ‘King’s Island’) near Ardfern in Argyll.
Another legendary City figure has also become an island owner, with hedge fund tycoon Ian Wace of Marshall Wace purchasing 800-acre Tanera Mòr, the largest of the Summer Isles off the coast near Ullapool. Wace has been busy spending millions on renovating the island’s ruined buildings, partly to provide a retreat for former servicemen and women.
Despite the Scottish Government thwarting several attempts to buy the substantial islands of Ulva and Gigha, instead insisting they were both part of community buy-outs, the seclusion they offer means that the market in Scottish islands continues to attract some of the world’s wealthiest people to our shores. Art dealer Vanessa Branson, for instance, owns the idyllic Eilean Shona in Lochaber, which she laughingly claimed is ‘bigger and better’ than brother Richard’s Caribbean hideaway of Necker Island.
Many well-heeled individuals, it seems, either own Scottish island estates or whole islands. And plenty more appear keen to join the club.