‘It’s a feeding frenzy. There’s so much money’

Judi Bevan meets a top estate agent who thinks only a terrorist bomb can stop the capital’s house prices soaring

Peter Rollings is one of those glowingly fit and forceful people who emit an unrelenting positive energy into the air around them. ‘Yes, energy is my big thing,’ he says, enthusiastically. ‘I don’t see the point of being down. Energy is infectious but so is negativity.’

He’s instantly friendly, the sort of chap who can strike up a rapport with anyone from a secretary looking for her first flat to a Russian oligarch wanting a Regency stucco pile in Belgravia. Yet behind the smile, his brown eyes are as hard as marbles.

Rollings is an estate agent; in fact he’s probably the luckiest estate agent in Britain. In June 2005, after 20 years running Foxtons, an agency known for its controversial hard-sell practices, he fell out with its founder Jon Hunt. ‘I felt we were too hard on the people,’ he says. More crucially Hunt refused to give him an equity stake in the business. Rollings walked out, borrowed a sack of money and bought the Marsh & Parsons agency in a joint venture with the Irish group Sherry FitzGerald — run by Mark FitzGerald, son of the Irish politician Garret FitzGerald. Rollings owns 24 per cent.

Six months later the London house market lifted off a four-year plateau and in 2006 it blasted towards the stars. Rollings reckons that prices rose overall by 30 per cent in two years – but for properties worth more than £5 million, the rise is as much as 70 per cent.

The über-rich, in particular ‘non-domiciled’ residents who live here but pay taxes elsewhere, had arrived from Russia, China and India with a callous disregard for anything other than getting what they want.