Maths teacher who built a £75m property fortune

By Jaya Narain

AS a maths teacher, Judith Wilson always had a head for figures. And now she is counting up the noughts after creating a £75mi1lion property empire in just 16 years. Her extraordinary success began when she and her husband Fergus scraped together enough cash to buy a second home to let. Property followed property and now the 52-year-old tycoon has a portfolio of 465 rental houses across the South-East.
The Wilsons have given up their teaching jobs, own a string of racehorses and are having a luxury five-bedroom house built for them in the Kent countryside. When interest rates were cut last month, Mrs Wilson spent £6.9rmliion on property in one afternoon. The business has been built on buying homes that have both soared in value and proved easy to let.
Mr Wilson said: 'Judith saw young professionals wanted new houses a stone's throw from transport links so she bought them all. 'They were not families, they were single people who wanted large, detached houses with off-street parking. 'She always says you cannot give people jam tarts if they want cream puddings.'

Mrs Wilson started speculating in 1987 when property prices were much lower. Two of her first purchases, semi-detached houses in Maidstone, Kent, are now worth £500,000 each. She paid just £50,000 apiece. To spot bargains, Mrs Wilson studied the social make-up of her target areas and kept a watch on house-price inflation and interest rates. She bought many of her homes 'off-plan' and by the time they were actually built the properties had doubled in value. She used the equity in her existing houses to secure mortgages for further purchases. Within five years of her first purchase she had made enough money to give up teaching for good. 'We began to feel like we were printing money,' said Mr Wilson. 'We are very simple people but we could see properties were rising by the minute. For every £1 we took in rent, the properties were going up in value by £5.' He said his wife had always been careful with money and at university recorded her spending 'down to the last penny'.
The Wilsons now own entire estates of homes in Kent. Their ten racehorses are stabled with leading trainer Martin Pipe and competed in the Cheltenham Cup Gold earlier this month. But this new-found wealth has not gone to their heads, insists Mr Wilson. He says they live 'modestly -like former maths teachers'. They have sold several homes at a massive profit but have no plans to cash in their business and are preparing to expand still further. In the last two years they have bought 120 properties on and around an estate in Ashford, Kent, the town where the Wilson empire is based. The Government wants 24,000 homes to be built in the surrounding area, which is on the route of the Channel Tunnel rail link. 'If John Prescott is going to build them, Judith might as well be the landlord,' sald Mr Wilson. l.clark@dailymail.co.uk

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