Residential Land, the investment vehicle of entrepreneur Bruce Ritchie, has made its first foray into serviced flats sector with the purchase of Grand Plaza in Bayswater, central London.

Grand Plaza. London flats for rent

Ritchie bought the 205-flat block from a joint venture between Singapore-based serviced residence operator Ascott Group and Bahraini developer Crown Dilmun.
The price is undisclosed, although Ritchie said it is Residential’s largest single-asset purchase.
The property at 42 Princes Square has been valued with vacant possession. However, Ritchie said Residential Land would run it as a fully serviced, short-stay business for the time being, with the aim of generating annual gross.
  ‘We’ve got our work cut out, but we’re confident we can do it.’ Ritchie’s optimism is based on the high number of enquiries for Residential Land’s large number of conventional flats in Bayswater and the strength of the private rental market in central London.
’We’re turning people away on a daily basis,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of marriage value between what we’re turning away and what we can put in that building.’
Ritchie indicated that in the long term, the 115,000 sq ft ‘trophy asset’ could be converted from short-stay serviced units to conventional flats.
’We’re certainly looking at it and whether it would be worthwhile for Westminster [City Council] to give that consent,’ he said.
Residential Land agreed the Grand Plaza purchase in July and completed it last week. Grand Plaza follows Residential Land’s purchase of Roland House in Kensington from Ascott and Crown Dilmun nearly two years ago.

For flats to rent in London visit http://www.residentialland.com

Residential Land CEO, Bruce Ritchie, was recently featured in Property Week. Below is the article:

It is not every day that I get to have lunch at the Mirabelle. And nor is it every day that my lunch companion to have brief talk by mobile phone and coolly buys block of eight flats.

Bruce Ritchie

The lunch competition in question is Bruce Ritchie, who just happens to co-own the Mirabelle, one of the world’s top restaurants in the heart of prime central London, which is very much Richie’s business arena.
The rich are not, of course, like the rest of us, and Ritchie proves the point. His friends, for example include the likes of Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, to whom he could be related. A few days earlier, at short notice, Ritchie decided to throw a birthday bash for him, hired Kensington Palace as the venue and imported Mirabelle’s chefs do catering.

Nor is Mirabelle the only restaurant in Richie’s portfolio of upmarket eateries: the others are Drones, Quo Vadis and the Criterion.
But it is Ritchie’s residential portfolio that we are here to talk about. And, for me, the privilege is as rare as the vintage wine he orders.

Richie is publicity-shy. Few people will have heard of him, he doesn’t make the gossip columns, and he doesn’t do interviews. Even researching him via Google is a non-starter, with almost no information about him on the internet. This is deliberate: ‘I don’t like publicity that I can’t control’, he says.

Buying spree
Ritchie, who used to run an estate agency at one point, is now a man on mission – to snap as much prime London property as he can: all of it residential, and virtually all in purpose-built, self-contained blocks of flats and houses.

To this end, he employs five full-time and two part-time consultants, from estate agency backgrounds, whose job it is to scout the capital on a daily basis, looking for properties to acquire.

‘We talk to 1,700 agents and surveyors on a daily basis,’ says Ritchie, who throws the largest party in London each year for estate agents. But (and here is the reason he speaking to The Negotiator) he would like to be talking to any that he could be missing, and as he always wants to be the first to be tipped off about suitable property, he’s keen to recruit more property scouts.

‘We don’t tend to buy anything under £1 million, and we don’t look at anything heavily regulated. We try to buy freehold or on long leases.’

Refurbishments
Much of the property acquired by Ritchie’s company, Residential Land, is newish and purpose-built, but he likes refurbishing on an often drastic scale: he will egularly ship in his team of builders for a two-week intensive project. He has also converted the odd hotel.

What he really looks for is an ‘unworked’ residential block, where he can add value by managing it as an asset. And the value he adds is undeniable: modernised kitchens, underfloor heating, solid wood flooring, steam and rain showers, real stone tiling and climate control are just some of the many finer points of his interiors. And, while most of the properties are bought to be managed by Residential Land, the company also trades and sells, using the same network of estate agents that buys though.

The son of an eminent doctor, and whose older brothers are a barrister and a scientist, Ritchie left school without really knowing what to do. ‘I went to Harrods as a trainee and bought a three-bedroom Wates house for £64,000. I lived in it for nine months and sold it for £93,000, which put my earlings at Harrods into perspective and opened my eyes. ‘He shapped up another property for £72,000 and sold it two weeks later for £86,000.  It dawned on me that not only could I make a profit in property, but I could make it quickly.’

Of course, it wasn’t all plain saling. In the eighties, property prices soared but then crashed fast: ‘One minute I was Mr Rich and the next, on the skids.’

By 1992, he was seriously back in business. With property prices still in the doldrums, he was talking to developers, buying blocks of flats at 40% discounts, on tiny 1% deposits, access on competion, and delayed completions, and then selling at auction: ‘I knew that if you could only buy cheaply enough, you could make a profit on particular day.’

Money to spend
Buying cheaply in prime central London is now a thing of the past, which means that in investment terms, yields have taken a bashing. But that doe not mean that there aren’t huge profits to be made and there continues to be substantial capital apprerciation in prime central London, which is why Ritchie is pursuing his ambition to buy 1 billion pounds worth of property in the capital’s 24 top postcodes: we are talking Knightsbrige, not Docklands, Chelsea not Hammersmith, and St John’s Wood rather than the city.

And absolutely nowhere on the ‘wrong’ side of Thames:’I’d get a nosebleed if I went south of the river,’ jokes Richie. The buying vechicles are two buy-to-let property funds, Pure Skill and Acquire London, created in a partnership with Richie’s Residential Land and Souh Bank of Scotland.

The idea is to invest in prime central London residential property at the level of hedge fund, and also to tradee and develop property as the portfolio builds up over the next five years. The advantage of buying blocks is their flexibility: individually refurbushed flats and houses can be sold off as and when necessary, or if they don’t quite fit the portfolio. The ultimate aim, however, is to build up the portfolio to sell it within two to five years, possibly on aninstitutional basis. A hallmark of the acquisition strategy – as I have just seen for myself – it that properties can be bought at lightning speed. Ritchie palns to buy up to 2,000 more units over the next 18 months and is open-minded as to whether he’ll also look at some flagship buildings.

Ritchie himself privately owns seven properties and believes that residential property investment is safe, although he cautions: ‘Any fool can buy, but it is a clever person who sells at the right  time. At the moment, I am buying, not selling, although it’s not a race to spend: it’s just prudent.’

Residential Land has hundreds of flats to rent in London, to search for rental properties in the capital visit http://www.residentialland.com

Residential Land featured in Property Week

Bruce Ritchie property Investment Company acquires 7-8 Bathurst Street in central London push.

  RESIDENTIAL LAND, THE PROPERTY investment vehicle of investor Bruce Ritchie has bought 7-8 Bathurst Street and an adjoining mews house next to London’s Hyde Park.
  The freehold properties have been added to a growing Hyde Park portfolio. They were sold by private Israeli investors who originally converted the 13,958 sq ft (1, 297 sq m) of properties into flats and office space.
Residential Land’s Latest purchase represents a continued strategy to acquire residential property within the Hyde Park Estate and other central London locations. Ritchie said: ‘It’s the company’s preference to acquire property like this in original parts of London that have been maintained at a level we feel we can add to. The properties tend to be undervalued and internationally owned.’ 

  The properties on Bathurst Street are split into nine lateral flats on short-term leases. The adjoining house on Bathurst Mews, which is mixture of office space and residential, faces the Ross Nye Horse Stables.
  As well as upgrading the existing flats, once the current leases are up, Residential Land is also to apply for planning permission to turn the mews building a four-bedroom house.
  The company, which already owns a similar property on Bathurst Street, recently won planning consent from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to change 94 serviced apartments at Roland House, Knightsbridge into flats.
  Acquired from a joint venture between the Ascott Group and Crown Dilmun, the property was on the market. The conversion from short-stay units to flats has the potential to push up capital value considerably and is expected to yield a gross yearly income.�
  Residential Land has become one of central London’s most prolific resedential investors.
Part of larger Residential and Commercial Holdings group of companies, its central London holdings alone equate about 250,00 sq ft (23,226sqm). Ritchie said: ‘From our point of view we are trying to bild a bigger rental portfolio of buildings that we can bring full value to though planning changes and development.’

For flats to rent in London visit http://www.residentialland.com

Residential Land featured in The Estates Gazette

For many people, buying and selling a flat is a hassle or, at best, a job. For Bruce Ritchie, it’s a way of life.
  ‘We’re getting to a stage now where we’re mostly bidding against the institutions,’ says Ritchie. ‘But that can be a big problem because many institutions vendors don’t know us and tend to go with people that they’ve heard of. Still, with a bit of work, we think we can expand even further and take them on.’
  Richie, who began his property career in the 1980s as a sideline while working as a sales manager and assistant buyer at Harrods department store, has built up, over past 20 years, a massive property portfolio and trading company worth a lot. Ritchie owns more than 1,000 prime London flats and has a joint share in such top London restaurants as Criterion, Mirabelle, Quo Vadis and Drones.
  ‘It was a running joke when I was at Harrods,’ says Ritchie. ‘Where’s the sales manager?’ ‘Oh, he’s on the phone to his solicitor doing another deal’. It was a pretty good job, really – not too stressful, so I could get on with buying and selling flats at the same time.’
  Richie’s property career was born when the south London boy realised one day that he could make more money flipping one flat than he could by working at Harrods for an entire year.

Bruce Ritchie

  He made his first purchase, 5 Albert Close in Hackney, N9, in 1985 at the tender age of 21. When he discovered that the property he had bought for £64,000 had increased in value to £96,000 in year, making him a profit that easily exceeded his annual salary, he was hooked. He quickly put an offer of £72,000 on the house next door, which he sold for £86,000 two weeks later.
  ‘I still go back to Harrods and see the people I was working with 20 years ago,’ he says. ‘Only now I’m a customer. You can see them thinking, ‘how has he managed to do so well for himself?’ It’s a good feeling.’
  Ritchie joined Harrods in 1983, aged 18, as an executive trainee. He had already built up a small business at his south London public school, Dulwich College, buying and selling cars in his spare time.
  ‘I was particularly keen on Lotuses in those days,’ says Ritchie. ‘I worked out that by buying cars at a used car dealership near Manchester Piccadilly station and re-selling them in London, I could make a fairly tidy profit.
  ‘It was the 1970s and I had a bright orange Lotus with a green interior,’’ he adds. ‘I used to backfire all the time. People certainly noticed you sitting in a queue of traffic.’
  By the time the quit Harrods in 1986, Ritchie had built up an extensive property operation by trading residential units across London. However, as many similar small property companies went to the wall during the late 1980s property crash, Ritchie was forced to think rather more creatively.

A newspaper advert opens doors
‘It was at the height of the recession. I was leafing though The Sunday Times and saw an advert from this bloke who was selling a list of repossessed flats from one particular lender,’ he says. ‘I called him up and he agreed send me the list for fifty quid.’
  ‘And then I thought, there’s money to be made from going corporate-style and selling an authoritative list of repossessions from all the main lenders rather than just one, as this guy had done.’

Ritchie’s next venture was the London Repossessions List. He bought a huge photocopier and persuaded the main lenders to contribute to a regular list which he published though a separate company, charging £65 for a three-month subscription. Repossessions were listed both alphabetically and by region. The list proved so popular that Ritchie even exhibited it at Earls Court.
  ‘I got to the point where we went to the Ideal Home Exhibition to sell the list in 1994,’says Ritchie. ‘I was still the middle of recession and no-one was selling any homes, so we got a ridiculous deal on stand 2086, the stand behind the Nationwide, and we had queues of people coming to look at the lists, which we put up for free.’
  Ritchie also managed to swing a cheap advertising deal at exhibition, and lists of 2,000 repossessed homes graced all the main turnstiles in the Earls Court centre. Subscriorions to thelist were also adertised though an irritating jungle on Capital Radio. To the bafflement of Ritchie, the ad generated the most telephone responses at 4am each morning.
  Meanwhile, dealing with repossessions allowed Ritchie, working from the company’s Abbey Ritchie, working from the company’s Abbey Road offeces in St Jon’s Wood, to cream off the best ones for his growing personal portfolio and trading company.
  He has a lot of residential properties, located mostly in the areas surrounding Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. And Ritchie, along with chef Marco Pierre White and restaurateur Jimmy Cahoud, is an investor in White Star Line, the company that owns upmarket restaurants Caprice, Criterion and Drones.
  The company owns Garden House a block of 58 rented flats in Kensington,W2, and has recently bought Roland House, a block of 94 flats in Kensington that was being marketed by Savills. His company is understood to have bid for the  £300 British Land residential portfolio now under offer to Insight.
  Now, with a large rental portfolio that is managed mostly by on-site managers and a staff of 18, the company is looking beyond small-time residential deals to invest in larger properties, both for reasons of economy of scale and because it faces fewer rival bidders.

Residential Land has a large selection of properties to rent in London. As one of the Capital’s largest private landlords, we are residential property experts specialising in the acquisition, sale, rental and management of our portfolio of over 1,200 flats in London.  Based in the heart of Mayfair, the Residential Land team invest at an institutional level acquiring increasing numbers of properties in our specific areas of operation.