[leashless]

As noted the 7000 was a transaction fee. The land was part of a more complex deal.

As for the rest of this: land gets planning permission when plans are presented - which is what property developers do for a living.

I would not expect somebody to plank down >1m on an asset they had no idea how to utilise: the expectation is the land will sell to a developer who is ready to go through that process.

What else would anybody do with it?

[phphphphp]

Nobody is going to buy it for >£1m because it's worthless. That's the point. Although at this point I am not sure what your story is, if I understand it correctly, you're saying West London Lets bought it for >£1m with no idea what to do with it...? Except they didn't, are you finally going to give up that charade given that you can see the purchase price on your own website? Here, read this: https://passport.mattereum.com/West.London.Lets.01/01_Identi...

"Title absolute 1 (28.02.2022) PROPRIETOR: WEST LONDON CITY LETS LIMITED (Co. Regn. No. 09214284) of 68 High Worple, Harrow HA2 9SZ. 2 (28.02.2022) The price stated to have been paid on 20 October 2021 was £7,000. 3 (28.02.2022) The Transfer to the proprietor contains a covenant to observe and perform the covenants contained within the registers of the..."

If you're going to lie, at least make sure your own website doesn't betray you :) Or, going back to the original point about stamp duty, the alternative is that your partners engaged in fraudulent reporting to evade stamp duty and your comments here are exposing them.

[leashless]

As noted, we have an independent valuation on file.

And the 7000 was part of a more complex transaction.

You simply don’t know what you’re talking about. You cannot buy a chunk of English coastline for 7000!

That’s just batshit. On your bike mate.

[dgroshev]

Oh my god, looking at one of your reports [1] I just realised what could have happened

Please tell me you didn't get a valuation for the whole plot HP123436 instead of the sliver that is actually in that title and is described on the page! Because while the text on the page says HP123436 and the reports were ordered for it, you are not selling the whole patch, you're selling a tiny piece of it, otherwise you'd include a bunch of other properties like [2] that are indeed worth way more

Edit: or maybe that's by design, the "complex deal" you are talking about actually does include those other properties, and the matterium page is designed to make a sale of a much larger property look like a sale of a £7k property to avoid SDLT and a bunch of other complications, while going through a shell company that clearly doesn't have nearly enough money for the whole thing. Surely you aren't doing that?

[1]: https://passport.mattereum.com/West.London.Lets.01/01_Identi...

[2]: https://search-property-information.service.gov.uk/search/su...

[phphphphp]

That’s a great catch! That would also explain the “…part of a larger deal…”: the larger property (homegrange house: https://housingcare.org/housing-care/facility-info-18883-hom...) was up for sale and is a care home owned by the same seller (McCarthy) that sold the little bit of beach to West London Lets, so I think, if we are to believe that leashless is just mistaken, your theory holds up.

I can’t reconcile how it never twigged for him that a little bit of beach would be worth so much money and how he is so committed to the belief in the face of so much evidence, but I guess there’s some time required to swallow this big of a mistake — hopefully he’ll get an apology from West London Lets, and maybe do some due diligence in future…

[phphphphp]

A complex transaction that took place through a single public listing at an auction house. That’s exactly how complex property deals happen.

Unfortunately, you’ve said I would have to sign an NDA to get more info from the seller which would make the whole exercise pointless. I will make an alternate offer: I will pay £10,000 to the charity of your choice if you show documentation that proves the land has been independently valued at more than £1m (by someone accredited) and that the land was purchased for more than the amount shown on the land registry.

I am sure, in the cold light of day, tomorrow, you’ll realise you’ve been had and you’ll have to have an awkward conversation with West London Lets where they reveal that actually it was purchased for £7k and actually they’ve valued it at £1.9m based on the assumption it can get planning permission and then you quietly remove all the posts about it from your website and pretend this never happened. I won’t hold it against you, but do implore you to reconsider your approach to who you work with. With partners like West London Lets, who needs competitors?

[leashless]

If you want to proceed down this path, I'd be very happy to take your ten grand offer to charity.

I have a valuation report, and I have details of the prior transaction.

I'm 100% sure that you have no intention of actually parting with your ten grand, but allow me to repeat myself here: actual real estate lawyers put this thing together, the land has a solid set of documentation including a valuation, and you're just trolling because you don't like blockchains and want to pretend you have expertise that you plainly do not.

So if you actually want to put ten grand into a charity, feel free to email me and we can arrange the details. We'll do a nice press release about your generous gesture and everything!

We're a serious team: mostly middle aged, mostly backgrounds doing pretty serious life-or-death work for the State. My MD worked on TB and HIV epidemiology in prisons preventing spread in prisons and to the community. I was a disaster planner working on worst case scenarios at the Pentagon and for a UK military think tank headed by a former UK Minister of Defense. Our CCO was commercial director of the UK home office for many years. Not a bunch of hicks, and not some fly-by-night operation.

Seriously people who do serious work.

Do email us about that ten grand. I think there are a couple of groups we would like to make a large donation to this Christmas.

Appreciate your engagement, but we do have the documents, and your plain desire for us to be amateurs and idiots is your problem, not mine.

Are we taking your money, or are you slinking back into a hole?

[phphphphp]

Which email address should I reach you at? I will happily take you up on it. I'll redirect one of my donations to the charity of your choice :)

So we're clear on the terms in public:

1. The land we are discussing is the piece of land highlighted in red here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221006130517/https://passport....

2. You will present an independent valuation from a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors showing a value of >=£1m for the same piece of land (1.72 acres) where "independent" means they're not a related party (e.g: a valuation produced by West London Lets is not acceptable)

2a. If I have concerns about the independence of the source of the valuation, I can, at my cost, instruct a member of RICS from the local area to value the land

3. You share "...details of the prior transaction..." which includes an explanation of the £7k "transaction fee" which demonstrates that the land in question was not purchased for £7k through the auction

4. I will not sign an NDA, I will return to this thread to either confirm I was wrong and correct myself, or confirm I was correct, the outcome must be shared

5. You donate £10k to my charity of choice if you're unable to satisfy the above conditions (A local homeless charity, The Crossings, charity number 1175115)

Deal?

[dgroshev]

It's a shame Vinay disappeared from this thread.

[dgroshev]

I believe I have a solid hypothesis for what happened there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33889445

If they indeed ordered a valuation for the whole plot as they did with the environmental assessment, it explains both the "£1M+ independent valuation", the £7k sale, and what the actual piece of land is.

I'm very eager to hear what leashless has to say.