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The Best...property show

Sarah Beeny
  • Posted at 1:53pm
  • 30 October 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 1 comment

There was a telling exchange in a recent episode of Property Ladder.

The much-lusted-after presenter, Sarah Beeny, was questioning a particular couple's decision to give up their careers and become property developers despite having poor organisational skills, and no money behind them. They replied: "But you CAN make a living doing this!" "Who says you can?" asked Sarah. "The television programmes say you can!" wailed the couple.

And therein lies the power of Property Ladder. It allows us to indulge our own pie-in-the-sky dreams of making thousands of pounds profit for virtually no effort - maybe just painting a few walls in an off-white shade, sticking a few downlighters in the ceiling and seeing how many dozens of cushions we can pile up at the headboard of a king-size bed.

Budgets and shopping lists scroll up the screen in a friendly blue font - a few grand frittered away on some oak floorboards, a figure for "miscellaneous costs" that's bigger than most people's average earnings for the year - and the whole thing is like a fantastic game, a mixture of an afternoon playing Monopoly and an evening playing with a doll's house. Of course, with dolls' houses you generally don't make plans to knock through downstairs to create a kitchen-diner that fits perfectly with the lifestyle of a young family from Guildford.

But the Property Ladder developers have big dreams. They want to convert a bungalow into a 15-storey palace, despite the fact that they don't have planning permission from the local council. They're blinded by a mixture of sheer greed and delusions of being top-notch designers. As they reveal bathroom plans that involve mounting fish tanks in the side of the bath, or kitchen designs that centre around a giant revolving spit that could support a 400lb wild boar, you hear them sighing, "Oh, this is our dream home." At which point the wonderful Sarah Beeny will witheringly point out that they aren't actually going to live there. They're going to be selling it as soon as they possibly can, not least because their interest payments are spiralling out of control.

Beeny is a saint, mainly because she manages to avoid swearing loudly when the developers reject yet another of her soundly thought-out ideas. It's hilarious, really: Beeny has been involved in property development for years and has a string of successes behind her, while the poor saps being filmed are desperate to get out of the rat race, have thrown in their jobs teaching English as a foreign language and have read a couple of interiors magazines. At home, we clutch our heads in astonishment at their stupidity.

But then, at the end of the questionable development, an estate agent wanders around making positive noises, saying things like "slightly tight into the eaves, but very attractive", before valuing it at half a million - purely because of the booming property market.

And at home, we sip our tea, and think: hey. We could do this. We could be property developers. No, really we could. And another successful series of Property Ladder is born.

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Comments

  • Posted on 20 February 2008
  • at 10:10am
  • by teihop
The Property Programs also tend to avoid the tax implications. If you don't earn anything from a normal job, then you pay 20% on the difference between the buying price and the selling price, up to £35,000 and 40% above £35,000. Irrespective of the amount you've spent on it. If you do have a day job, then those earnings are added into the profit total and taxed accordingly. Very few of the Property Programs show the developer living in the project to make it their Primary Personal Residence and thus tax exempt. Or going to jail for tax evasion :)

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