£3 million dream house that’s just that – a dream!
by Phil Green
If you’ve got £3 million to spend on a property you might well be attracted by this detached period house oozing faded elegance from every brick.
It’s advertised for sale by Birmingham estate agents Circle Sales & Lettings in their New Street premises in the heart of the city centre, and on websites like Rightmove, and until recently, Zoopla and Prime Location.
The 8 bedroom detached house is described as being in Edgbaston, and offers around £2,975,000 are invited. Unfortunately, this particular dream house is just that – dreamed up! It does not exist – at least not in that form, or in Birmingham. The exterior photograph is of a house in Cheshire over 70 miles away which featured in the BBC series, ‘The Planners’.
The rather over-the-top dining room is actually in Audley House in London, 120 miles away – one of Mayfair’s luxury mansions.
And apart from the first couple of lines, the ‘Property description’ in the online listing is taken word for word from the description of a Grade II Listed villa in Cheltenham, 50 miles away.
But most impressive of all is the garden, which it turns out has been lifted from a site called laurries.blogspot – and is over 3,000 miles away in north central Connecticut, USA!
So, fantastic as it may seem, the Edgbaston dream house is just cobbled together – nothing but an elaborate concoction by Circle Sales. Also offered for sale by the company is an old Birmingham church – a snip at £3,000,000. The church is real, but whether it’s really for sale – God only knows!
The director of Circle Sales, Ishfaq Ali Hussain, has over 20 active companies at present and his estate agency was preceded by another of his businesses called Clinic Republic which opened to a great fanfare in the Birmingham Mail and offered everything from Eyelash Transplants and Teeth Whitening to Scalp Pigmentation and Vaser Lipo.
It went belly up after less than 2 months – leaving staff and suppliers out of pocket according to Facebook. (Court Judgments against the companies behind Clinic Republic are already in excess of £50,000.) But from the ashes rose Circle Sales offering a wide range of properties from small terraced houses to high-end apartments in the Rotunda and the Mailbox, plus a sprinkling of commercial premises – and the church! Unfortunately, it looks like the Circle Sales offerings could be just cosmetic too, consisting largely of properties taken from other agents’ listings, or made-up, or personally owned by Mr Hussain or one of his companies. He has already had to remove a listing of a house which he himself once owned, and which was repossessed and remarketed in 2013 [below]. It had been trashed.
The current owners were shocked to discover last month that their house was being advertised for sale on Circle Sales [below] – and with a photograph lifted from last year’s listing by the other agent, but now the price was double! The interior pictures were even older, taken before the house was trashed.
It may well be that the only genuine listings at Circle Sales are of properties Mr Hussain is associated with. But even more serious, it is a legal requirement for estate agents to be registered with an ombudsman scheme that handles complaints – and Circle Sales is not, which means that if you part with money and things go wrong, you would have no redress. So the message seems clear – give Circle Sales & Lettings a wide birth and look for your dream house elsewhere.
If you have personal experience of Mr Ishfaq Ali Hussain, or any information about Circles Sales, Clinic Republic or any other of his numerous companies, that you would like to share, then you can leave a comment by using the link at the top. If you would prefer to send a private message in confidence then please use the form below. Thanks.
Circle Sales & Lettings 