Bringing in buy to let

Take a walk around the magnificent 12,000 sq ft of plush new offices on the 16th floor of Dubai's Park Place and you start to get an inkling of how successful Grant Bovey has become.

Whizz over to London and on the way into the city centre you'll pass a large glass-fronted building on the city's Hogarth Roundabout that is being transformed into a 13,000 sq ft mega ‘buy-to-let' showroom.

Both have been acquired by the CEO of Imagine Homes, along with impressive headquarters in Farnborough, Hants, overlooking the airport, offices in London's Mayfair and Canary Wharf, Singapore and Dublin.

Imagine Homes provides a buy-to-let acquisition service which sources properties for buyers and then lets them out, guaranteeing buyers a rental income for four years.

It employs 160 people, in six different countries and expects to turnover US$567m next year, making the company the biggest acquirer of UK properties in the country.

Then there's Bovey's own personal property portfolio, shared with his wife, that includes a US$12m, 60-acre estate in Surrey, a three-bedroom house in Chelsea Wharf, London plus a ski chalet in Megève in France that together are worth around US$120m.

Bovey was caught up in a media storm seven years ago after posing for the UK celebrity magazine OK! with a bar of Cadbury's Snowflake on his and wife UK television celebrity Anthea Turner's wedding day, attracting headlines like the Sun newspaper's "the most sickening wedding photo ever".

He admits now that mistakes were made and that the incident left its mark on his reputation in the business world.

We made a terrible error of judgment selling the wedding to OK! It was a terrible time in terms of what happened to both of us. I take full responsibility for that. We are over it now but at the time the consequences of what happened had a huge impact on both Anthea and me.

"For me it was very difficult in the business community. It was just too big to ignore. At one point I was referred to as ‘Anthea's deadbeat husband'. When you're working in the business community that makes life very difficult," he says.

Looking around Bovey's Dubai offices with its fabulous views over Sheikh Zayed Road and the Emirates Towers out into the desert - he's spending around US$2m fitting them out - it's clear that his career and business have fully recovered from the earlier controversy.

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