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Profile
Beauty products to trees – unleveraged development fuels expansion
Thirty years ago, a teenage university student set up a natural skin care products company from his bedroom that provided the springboard for a huge international property investment enterprise – including, as Ray Spencer found, the creation of a £1⁄2bn Gibraltar integrated office, retail, entertainment and residential Ocean Village marina development
over time to that economy, not what other people are thinking”, he explains, adding: “When I see a dichotomy between those two, whereby the current valuation is far lower than my expectation of the future, that’s when I try to invest.”
The Channel Islands was Butcher’s original investment administration base, but he first visited The Rock in 1997 after a friend suggested, “Gibraltar works harder”. Butcher, frustrated by professionals ceasing work at 16.30, instead started using Gibraltar where “there was more of a work ethic than the Channel Islands, so if you needed to do a property completion that day, [lawyers and accountants] would stay in their offices until 8pm to get it done.” A year later he opened a Gibraltar office and soon saw development opportunities.
In 1999, he bought the severely fire damaged Heritage House in Main Street that he still owns. After reducing the height, because the building’s construction integrity had been compromised, he recreated the original design: “We even laser copied the engraving on part of the original interior windows we had saved.”
Restoration followed on the former Gibraltar and Iberian Bank building in Cannon Lane. “The place was a wreck and had been empty for many years except for all of the bank’s documentation relating to mortgages and deposit details – it was like the Marie Celeste,” Butcher recalls.
Three years’ work at Lord Napier Mews that he restored and extended instead of demolishing, utilised an American construction system “allowing us to tailor the individual [floor] levels of each part of the building and even to replicate the waviness of some walls” to produce 12 luxury homes in 2006.
“These buildings [dating from the late 1800s] are always a challenge: as they were, they were pretty much unusable”, he says. “Restoring old buildings is my penchant, but to do it successfully, you have to change things.”
During the 1990s property downturn, he bought “a portfolio of 248 assets in London and the south east”. And then his
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Unpretentious, unassuming, Gregory (Greg) Butcher says he has no idea what he’s worth financially; nor does
he know which has been his largest property development – “I don’t think like that, honestly”.
Aiming for His assets span large-scale land
revenue, not primarily capital properties and manufacturing (mostly UK,
generator and all manner of environmentally advanced innovations) that he had developed in South Wales, to dominate markets in the UK, Germany, Holland, US, Canada and Australia and sells in 86 countries. Early on he also developed a research and development operation; “together [with toiletries] they were very profitable, (the toiletries business spectacularly so), which funded my property investment.”
Fairhomes Group, Butcher’s Gibraltar- based development company, buys in distressed, special and turn-around situations. His UK, Dutch and Gibraltar investments were said five years ago to have development value of some €192m.
All assets unleveraged
Buying in a slump and capitalising on recov- ery is his modus operandi. “I tend to invest in countries that have experienced a crash, but I’m a long-term holder; Germany, for example, is major – we have hundreds of assets, including an office park, supermarket and 80 commercial platforms, and hundreds of residential properties”. But he insists investment is not primarily for capital gain: “I like revenue, which allows me to have an even bigger war chest for the future years; it just builds up.”
The extent of the US downturn was unusual, so America collectively is Butcher’s largest investment, all assets unleveraged. He became the third largest holder of land lots when he bought well over 1,250 lots in coastal areas or by rivers, with all roads, lighting, sewage infrastructure installed, in one of Florida’s counties. “I have three quarters of a decade of development to do there when we get round to building them out.” He also owns many hundreds of US homes.
“I have always gone against market wisdom”, he admitted. “I believe you should back an economy based on what will happen
holdings, commercial, retail and residential gains: Europe and the US), and consumer data
Gregory Butcher, Fairhomes chairman
handling companies (Asia). Almost all interests are underpinned by his deep-rooted commitment to healthy living principles: a desire to improve our work and living environment.
It started with Montagne Jeunesse, the face mask to rubs business that he established in 1985 when studying for an economics degree at Kingston-upon-Thames University, at the same time Butcher became a vegetarian. His beauty products are based on natural ingredients – “we cut and chop whole oranges into our lines when others simply use a fragrance, for example, so you sometimes get the tissue of oranges in them and we use grapefruit similarly”.
The beauty business (now renamed 7th Heaven) grew substantially from the UK’s first Eco-Factory (with its own wind
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