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Now that Shilpa Shetty is an A-list celebrity in Britain, how will she spend her
new-found millions? She'll need a house, for a start - so when she starts to survey the property market, where will she head?Will it be Kensington, where there were nearly 100 sales at more than £3 million last year, or perhaps the Cotswolds, where Elizabeth Hurley and Prince Charles have their private estates? The answer could well be somewhere rather more prosaic. Beaconsfield.
A wave of wealthy British Indians are flexing their buying power, moving out of the London homes where they made good and buying into the millionaire commuter belt in the posh parts of the Home Counties. There is a new "Asian Arc" stretching from Watford, Hertfordshire, through Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire to St George's Hill in Surrey, and it is pushing sky-high property prices even higher.
"British Indians are moving out from west London for good schools and commutability, to Beaconsfield, Gerrards Cross and the leafy villages around Slough such as Taplow, Iver and Stoke Poges," says Nick Warner of Savills in Beaconsfield. He notes that British Indians whose businesses have prospered are interested in both £5 million houses and the £1-£3 million range, ratcheting up a highly competitive market in an area which is already "very, very prime".
Money is no object. Indeed, it is there to be spent and they are proud of it. The top 300 millionaires in last year's British Asian Rich List, headed by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, had a combined worth of £35.5 billion. Indian companies are on the move, with Tata Steel taking over Corus, and Ananova bidding for the National Lottery.
While Shilpa Shetty seduced a huge television audience on Celebrity Big Brother, the arts world has fallen in love with Indian film-makers and novelists such as Gurinder Chadha, who made Bend It Like Beckham, and Kiran Desai, winner of the Man Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss. As the Calcutta Telegraph noted, Tata, Desai and Shilpa have just pulled off "an Indian hat-trick in London".
For many British Indians, it is the end of a remarkable journey that began with the expulsion of thousands of Asians from Kenya and Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. Many arrived in the UK with nothing more than an unshakeable work ethic and a belief in good education and social betterment. Others came to wealth more recently after India embraced the free market in the 1990s. According to Merrill Lynch's world wealth report, India now has 87,000 millionaires.
The year of 2007 is going to be very big for Indian buyers," says Jaideep Singh, who has been Knight Frank's expert on the Indian market for almost a decade. "The rich are getting richer and now the middle-class Indians are coming here to set up offices and buy a place - but they are shocked that their £2 million will buy so little."
Jaideep has recently shown four or five houses to Indian buyers in St George's Hill, Weybridge, the exclusive estate in Surrey where John Lennon and Tom Jones lived, and where Sir Cliff Richard still owns a house. "Discretion is important," he says. "I am looking for huge houses but I cannot talk about it. Since I began, the business has multiplied 100 to 200 times."
No wonder Savills estate agents has launched a bespoke Indian desk, run by 26-year-old Sheetell Halai. "The Indian economy is taking off," says Sheetell, who toyed with a Bollywood film career before commerce won through. "There are 2.7 million Indians in this country and so many new millionaires, so it makes sense to offer a bespoke service. Also there are language and cultural barriers. The caste system, for instance, still matters with many people."
Her task is to help Indian buyers, both here and coming into the country. "Indians are master hagglers. If someone offers a property worth £10 million, an Indian buyer will immediately think of half the value and then find somewhere between the two. I don't think that is rude. In order to build up and manage relationships I need to make sure we do not overvalue."
British Indians who have done well, she says, are now moving out from areas like Stanmore and Harrow-on-the-Hill, where they already own the biggest houses in the street. "They have big but they want bigger: 4,000 sq ft is about right," she says.
Those moving into country mansions often choose to live near friends, but for pioneers this was not possible. When Maya and Yogi Sachdev arrived in England nine years ago, so that Yogi could develop his speciality chemical business, they bought near Cobham in Surrey. Now they are selling their six-bedroom house for £4.25 million through Savills (020 7499 8644). "We chose this area because the schools are excellent," says Maya, "but now our two children have left home for America we need to downsize. When we first came we knew no one, but we are a well travelled family and we had no difficulty."
Sheetell is hoping that Shilpa Shetty will come to her when she wants to buy a house, and she has already given it some thought. Despite the exodus to Beaconsfield, Shilpa will be more at home in London's Primrose Hill, Sheetell believes, as it is central and arty. "Indians want to put their money into the British property market because it is the safest in the world," she says. "They'll always choose property rather than the stock market."
Sadly, English houses don't always come up to expectations: the rooms seem small, and many need another £1 million spent to bring them up to the standard required. So now a new breed of British Indian developers is creating the right kind of new houses. Among them are Harjit Singh and Superna Sethi, whose company, Manhattan, is rebuilding a property in Gerrards Cross. The result, in the sought-after Camp Road, will be a palatial 16,000 sq ft house named Shaanti, meaning "Peace". It will have an Olympic-size pool, and waterfalls alongside a heated driveway.
"We chose Gerrards Cross because it has more millionaires than anywhere else in the country, and dictates more pounds per sq ft," Superna says. They are refurbishing a second house called Wykehurst, which they say will be as smart as an international hotel. "I must rename it," says Harjit, whose previous career was as a film producer and actor.
"Bollywood is all glamour but not enough money," he observes. "Property is less glamour but more money." They now have their eye on a Grade II-listed mansion with 25 acres at Fulmer, near Beaconsfield. "We have hardly started yet," Harjit says. With India predicted to be the world's second largest economy by 2050, he may be right.
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