Anger as buy-to-let guru plans vulture fund to buy back slump- hit property at a big discount
Plans: Inside Track founderJim Moore
After encouraging thousands to jump on board the buy-to-let bandwagon, Jim Moore, the founder of bankrupt property seminar outfit Inside Track, is now planning to prey on their depreciating assets with a new vulture fund.
Having initially charged Inside Track customers ‘finder’ fees of several thousand pounds to source new-build properties - many of which proved difficult to rent and have plummeted in value - Moore is now planning to set up and run a property fund that he proposes will buy them back at hugely discounted prices.
Moore, who divides his time between his luxury villa in Marbella and a flat in Geneva, is looking for investors in a £500million fund, which will be run by Park Lane-based Sterling Property Assets.
His database of former Inside Track clients will be the starting point of future marketing.
‘Millions were made when the property market was rising, and millions more could be made now it is falling,’ said Moore at a dinner last week in London’s swanky Lanesborough Hotel.
‘I have met 350 former clients in recent weeks. Most are high earners who will weather the storm, so I do not think we will see a high level of transactions.
'But for those who have bitten off more than they can chew, this is a way out.’
Properties would be bought at a discount of 20 to 25 per cent of their current values. Many are oversupplied, two-bedroom flats in city centres that have lost 40 per cent of their value since the market peak in October last year.
‘I prefer to think of this as a lifeboat fund to help people out who are in difficulty and to do something to get the British property market moving again,’ said Moore.
But such altruism sits ill with many of his former customers who bitterly regret their involvement with Inside Track and its parent company Instant Access Properties, which went bust two months ago.
‘This man should not be allowed to carry on in business. I lost my life savings and my inheritance. Now I could lose my home,’ says Tamsin Barks, a vet and mother of two from Haywards Heath, West Sussex.
Riches: Jim Moore's luxurious villa in Marbella
She has lost hundreds of thousands of pounds after spending £1.1million on six villas and apartments in Spain, Florida and Manchester through Instant Access Properties.
Mrs Barks, 47, was also disgusted to learn that Moore is being considered for a starring role in Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire, although no decision has been made.
Gary Hynes, 51, a photographer, from Oxton, in The Wirral, has a £110,000 mortgage on a Manchester flat he bought in 2004 for £128,000, which Instant Access Properties told him was discounted from £140,000. He reckons he paid Moore’s companies £9,000 in fees.
Hynes has never been able to let the flat - now worth £70,000 - for enough rent to cover the mortgage.
‘I would have to look at any offer, but it would stick in my throat to have to deal with Jim Moore again,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe that he has reinvented himself like this, making money from the same people.’
Moore concedes that some former investors have expressed anger towards him.
‘It would not be honest to deny that, and there have been some incidents. But this fund will be responsibly run, without aggressive canvassing.’
Moore founded Inside Track in 2002.
Promises of riches lured would-be investors to seminars at a cost of £2,500 per couple and 10,000 paid £6,000 or more each to join Moore’s property ‘club’, Instant Access Properties.
By 2007, it had sold 17,000 flats.
Moore was on the brink of selling the businesses in July 2007 to a UK entrepreneur for £120million when the credit crunch struck.
In the event, his companies collapsed earlier this year. More of Moore’s wealth slipped through his fingers this summer in the form of a £16million divorce settlement to his former wife, Kim.
‘It was a very, very hard-sell outfit,’ says Pierre Williams, who was briefly the company’s Press officer.
‘I was not aware of any wrongdoing, but it was highly sensitive to Press criticism. As soon as journalists asked awkward questions, I was told to get Schillings solicitors to see them off with a warning letter.’
Ironically, Schillings was owed more than £60,000 when the companies went bust.
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