Plot Sale Scams

Over the past couple of years, I have had a number of enquiries from people who have "invested" in land plot sale schemes.

Beguiled by hard selling boiler room style salesmen, they have parted with sums from £5,000 to £20,000 in exchange for small plots of land.

The premise behind such sales is generally that sooner rather than later planning consent "will" be granted for the development of the plots and instead of a field or wood, we will see rows of neat little houses, smoke gently swirling from chimneys, happy children playing with their hoops in the tidy streets.

Nice, eh?

But unfortunately fantasy.  What actually happens is that unscrupulous and greedy swindlers purchase agricultural or forestry land for peanuts and then sell portions of it to the gullible for maybe twenty or thirty times the amount they paid for it.

The land will generally have absolutely no development value at all. if you are being told otherwise, then you are being lied to. Frequently the plots offered are too small for much more than a shed.

The Government has done little about this scam, which if done "properly" is perfectly legal.  The FSA is powerless unless the promoters can be caught running an unauthorised "collective investment scheme", which they often are not. By the time the slow moving and underfunded trading standards staff get to these operations, they have moved on, cash rich and chuckling, to their next venture.

So could anything be done?

A simple step would be to deprive these schemes of the veneer of legality by making the offering for sale, either as principal or agent, of multiple plots of undeveloped land without planning consent, a regulated activity under FSA supervision.

Exceptions would need to be made for land sold for agricultural purposes only of at least 4,000 square metres.


I have started up a petition about this on the No 10 website, and will post the link shortly, when it has been "vetted" and, one hopes, approved.


If you have any sudden urge to invest in a plot of land, you should see a Solicitor before signing anything or paying over money.  Sites maintained by these swindlers will suggest that you don't need a Solicitor - "would you use one to buy a car?" - one of them says - but the answer to that is that you can check the car and see if it works before you buy it. Don't become another victim.