‘I bought a dilapidated former cowshed at auction, now it's worth £1.1m'

Telegraph

4 hours ago

When Mathilde Case-Hogestijn moved to the UK from France in 2006, she thought she had plenty of time to buy a home here.
Originally from the Netherlands, her first husband had passed away and, in a bid to set herself up for the future, she used the proceeds from selling her French property to bolster her business, which imports home accessories and furniture.
What she hadn't bargained for was the speed of rocketing UK house prices. 'Life has a funny way of pulling the rug from under you,' says Case-Hogestijn, 65. 'I rented on a farm in Alfriston, East Sussex. I loved where I lived in the cottage, but to be a tenant isn't certain. Anything could happen; you could be told to leave in two months' time.'
She met her now-husband, Paul, 64, in 2012. He didn't own a property either, and moved in with her. Even with two incomes, the couple found it difficult to find somewhere they wanted to buy within their budget.
'From around 2013, the property market just kept going upwards and Paul thought we wouldn't own again… I kept looking for five years. We had an extensive wish list, but not very much money,' she says.
The couple decided to consider less common routes to home ownership and, in 2018, a house came up for auction in the nearby village of Herstmonceux, with a guide price of £200,000.
It was unusual, to put it mildly. The property was a former cowshed that had been converted into a house. Not only had it become dilapidated since then, but it had an agricultural tie, meaning only those working in farming or forestry, or their dependents, could live there.
'You stood at the entrance to the garden but that was as far as you could go in. There were wild cherries and brambles everywhere – Snow White would have been happy here – but the view [of the South Downs] was unbelievable,' says Case-Hogestijn.
The house sat in a garden that covered a third of an acre and had two bedrooms, a small sitting room and a kitchen, but there was no electricity or water. 'It had sycamores growing in the living room and you couldn't get into the toilet because of the ivy.'
At this point, most people would turn and run the other way, but not Case-Hogestijn. Despite the property being, in her words, 'a ruin in a bramble thicket', and with no option to get a mortgage on it, the couple decided to borrow money from friends in order to bid. 'We had £100,000 and borrowed £150,000… We thought it would go for over £300,000,' she says.
Buying at auction can be risky, but the couple were careful to do their due diligence beforehand, sending the legal pack to a solicitor, and speaking with a planning consultant about the likelihood of the agricultural tie being removed. 'Because they are quite wise to [people buying agricultural ties], you can't just have 10 chickens… [But] I thought we could remove it.'
Case-Hogestijn hadn't bid for a property at auction before, but she'd seen it done on TV plenty of times. 'I'd watched Homes Under The Hammer and had a game plan: I decided that, if it was still within budget, I'd wait till the auctioneer said: 'Going once, going twice…' and then I would bid. It got to £250,000 and I raised my paddle, and then it went quiet... and I got it.'
The rise of property auctions
Buying a home at auction is not the norm, but an increasing number of properties are being bought and sold this way. Last year, around 39,000 properties were listed by auctioneers, of which approximately 27,700 were sold, according to Essential Information Group Property Auctions. This has already ramped up this year – to the end of April, 12,384 properties have been offered and 8,585 sold.
Elsewhere, 2024 was a record-breaking year for Savills Auctions, with over £810m raised – the highest in the department's history, and a 42pc increase on 2023.
'The UK property auction market has seen significant growth in the number of lots offered, lots sold, and the total funds raised, indicating a continued buoyancy to the market. There's a sense that more properties are coming to the fore, and an appetite to match,' says Jeremy Lamb, a director within Savills Auctions.
While Lamb can't confirm if the purchase prices of properties at auction are less than if they were sold via traditional means, he says: 'Ultimately, lots are priced to sell, with the aim of achieving market price on the day with competitive bidding.'
Like Case-Hogestijn's former cowshed, some properties are sold this way because they're unmortgageable, although this isn't always the case.
'Thorough due diligence is essential before bidding. If you're unsure about a property's condition, commissioning a survey or specialist inspection – and obtaining any relevant reports – is strongly recommended,' says Lamb.
'It's also advisable to appoint a solicitor as early as possible. They can review the legal pack for any property you're considering, as well as advise on searches, planning permissions and other critical legal details.'
Be aware that buying at auction comes with much tighter deadlines than a standard property purchase. Auction purchasers must pay a non-refundable 10pc deposit when they secure the winning bid and then need to complete within 28 days.
'Ultimately, auctions provide a level playing field and a fantastic opportunity to purchase a wide variety of property in a swift and transparent way,' says Lamb. 'There's also the opportunity to pick up a good deal.'
'We had six maxed-out credit cards and two personal loans'
For Case-Hogestijn, securing the house was only the start of the journey. As the couple's priority was to pay back their friends, they couldn't start work straight away. Instead they had to prioritise saving hard so they could repay the loan in a year.
'Business was good that year, so we lived on peanut butter sandwiches and saved as much as we could,' she says.
At the same time, they put forward the case for getting the agricultural tie taken away. 'It only took three months to remove it, and it was very simple because of the state of the property,' says Case-Hogestijn. 'I argued that, to afford this place, you'd need ten times a farm worker's salary and then seven times their salary to make it habitable.'
They then found a builder, two doors down, who could help out with the project on and off – which was perfect as they couldn't afford the outlay of a big company doing all the work in one go. In fact, they had to do a lot of the initial work themselves. 'We turned up on day one and thought: 'Where do we start?'… We had to clear it with a chainsaw,' says Case-Hogestijn.
'Because it was uninhabitable, we couldn't get a mortgage at first so we had to get it up to the point where we could borrow money against it.'
To finance these initial renovations, the couple pushed their borrowing to the limit. 'We had six maxed-out credit cards and two personal loans that came to well over £150,000,' Case-Hogestijn says. Then, unfortunately, Covid hit and her husband's business suffered – 'Most of our clients dropped off and the business dropped away,' she says.
Fortunately, the couple had already managed to get the house into a state that would allow them to borrow against it, so they took out a mortgage for a little over £150,000 and paid off their debts, leaving a little extra with which to continue work.
It was July 2021 when they finally moved in, by which time they'd transformed the former cowshed into a four-bedroom house with two en-suites, a family bathroom, double garage, home office and a huge vaulted sitting room.
'We doubled the square footage,' says Case-Hogestijn. 'I knew it when I saw the view, I knew what you could do with it.'
The house is now valued at £1.1m. Case-Hogestijn estimates the renovations came to £500,000 but says they did as much as they could themselves, including some of the heavy work. The major projects have now all been completed, but they're not finished yet.
'In the future, we might build a summer house in a separate part of the garden, as it's very romantic.'