A man has been left stunned after £4,350 appeared in his bank account – and how he received the payments has been revealed
Tony Jordan was stunned when a check arrived in the mail from a company called YouSpotProperty.com — here we explain exactly what he did to receive his payout
When former London firefighter and taxi driver Tony Jordan, 61, received a phone call telling him he was owed £4,350, he was convinced it was a scam.
But the married father-of-two, who lives in Pinner, north-west London, was stunned when the money arrived in his bank account from a company called YouSpotProperty.com, and all he did was report the abandoned house. YouSpotProperty pays members of the public to report derelict and long-vacant properties in England.
If the home you’ve found meets their eligibility criteria, you’ll initially get a £20 voucher for M&S or Amazon. But if the company goes on to buy that house, it will get a 1% share of the value of the property, up to £10,000.
The property must be privately owned, not for sale, and no planning permission has recently been submitted. There are currently more than 250,000 properties sitting empty or derelict in England.
Tony, who is semi-retired and works as a part-time fire safety officer, received his compensation after YouSpotProperty tracked down the owners of the abandoned house he reported, and went on to buy it for £435,000. He said: “I often take a local bus which requires a short walk, and for a while I noticed a clearly derelict house, not least because of the overgrown front garden.
“The paint on the end of the three-bed porch was peeling from the woodwork and the house was screaming to be redone. It was such a big mess that you couldn’t deliver mail to the front door. No one would live in a house that looked inaccessible, so I Upload the home to YouSpotProperty.
Tony simply took some photos of the house, uploaded them to the company’s website along with the address, and then they continued investigating the property from there. To his surprise, he received a £20 voucher, but he received an even bigger shock when he received a call a few weeks later telling him the property had been sold.
He said: “I received a phone call from what sounded like a young woman telling me I was eligible for £4,350 from YouSpotProperty because the company had already gone ahead to buy the house I had reported. Alarm bells went off in my head when I was asked to provide my bank details. However, in contrast Many horror stories where random companies ask people for their bank details, this was completely legitimate.
Tony said he will use the money to holiday in New York and the states surrounding New England in the USA in 2024. YouSpotProperty receives between 350 and 400 property reports each week and distributes 110 vouchers worth £20 on average each month.
Paul Woodley from Hertfordshire became the top 1% beneficiary in 2017 as he was paid £10,000 after YouSpotProperty completed the purchase of a property worth £1.15 million.
