15 September 2023 , 10:46
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When former London fireman and taxi driver Tony Jordan, 61, received a phone call telling him he was due £4,350, he was convinced it was a scam.
But the married father-of-two, who lives in Pinner, north west London, was left stunned when the money landed in his bank account from a company called YouSpotProperty.com - and all he’d done was report an abandoned house. YouSpotProperty pays members of the public for reporting derelict and long-term empty properties in England.
If the house you find meets its eligibility criteria, then you will initially be given a £20 voucher for M&S or Amazon. But if the firm goes on to purchase that home, then you get a 1% share of the property value, up to £10,000.
The property must be privately owned, not up for sale, and had no planning permission applied for recently. More than 250,000 properties currently stand empty or derelict in England.
Tony, who is semi-retired and works as a part-time fire safety officer, received his payout after YouSpotProperty were able to track down the owners of the abandoned house he’d reported, and went on to buy it for £435,000. He said: “I often catch a local bus requiring a short walk, and for a while I’d noticed a house which was visibly derelict, not least because of the overgrown front garden.
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The overgrown and derelict property that caught his attention (Fiona Hanson)
Tony Jordan said it was easy to report the property (Fiona Hanson)“The three bed end-of-terrace had paint peeling off the woodwork and the house was crying out to be made over. It was such a mess you couldn’t have delivered mail to the front door. No one would live in a house that looked hard to even gain access to, so I uploaded the house to YouSpotProperty.”
Tony simply took some pictures of the house, uploaded it to the company website with the address, then they went on to investigate the property from there. To his surprise, he went on to receive the £20 voucher - but got an even bigger shock when he got a call a few weeks later, telling him the property had been sold.
Tony Jordan with his cheque (Fiona Hanson)He said: “I received a phone call from what sounded like a young woman telling me I was eligible for £4,350 from YouSpotProperty as the firm had actually gone on to buy the house I’d reported. Alarm bells sounded in my head when I was asked for my banking details. Yet, unlike many horror stories when people are asked by random firms for their banking details, this was fully legitimate.”
Tony said he will use the money to put towards a holiday to New York and the states around New England in the USA in 2024. YouSpotProperty receives between 350 to 400 property reports each week and hands out 110 £20 vouchers on average each month.
Paul Woodley of Hertfordshire became the largest 1% recipient in 2017 with £10,000 paid to him after YouSpotProperty completed the purchase of a £1.15million property.