King of the lock-up garage

Rodger Dudding is pulling back from his business. "I'm winding down - I'm only working seven days a week," he says.

The hyperactive 75-year-old, dressed in a black pinstripe shirt with monogrammed cuffs, would have every justification to shift down a gear. Over a long career he has accumulated personal assets of £150m by building an empire in an unglamorous but increasingly valuable corner of the property market: lock-up garages.

These rudimentary constructions, often tucked away down narrow lanes on neglected pieces of land, are hardly the stuff of Britain's property-obsessed fantasies. But Mr Dudding has proved the value of his "ticky-tacky, graffiti-ridden" garages, as he describes them. Having spent half a lifetime acquiring them, he now has 12,000, making him the biggest private owner in the UK.

He is speaking at the offices of Dudrich Holdings in Southgate, north London, where he employs 40 people and turns over £12m a year. A short drive up the road is his other passion: a collection of 200 classic cars that are lovingly cared for by a staff of four in Mr Dudding's private museum.

A trained engineer, Mr Dudding's first company was in queue management systems - a business that still accounts for 30 per cent of group revenues. But from the early 1970s he began to dip his toe into the garage-owning niche.

The idea was first suggested by his then business landlord, a wealthy property owner and friend who advised him that lock-ups were a good investment. He offered to sell him a block of 10 in Thornton Heath, near Croydon in south London.

Unenthused by the deal but agreeing to it out of deference to his property market mentor, Mr Dudding promptly forgot about them until a rental cheque for £40 arrived from the management company. After a second cheque arrived three months later, he had an epiphany: "I thought, if I had a hundred of these producing £3 a week each, that's serious Do-Re-Mi."

He made a rough calculation that there were about 1m lock-up garages in the country, aside from those owned by local authorities. So he started to buy them up systematically using an approach that was as sly as it was enterprising.

While his young family slept at home, he would leave the house at 4.30am on a Sunday morning, consult his A-to-Z map and drive around an area until he found a block of garages. By 9am, at least one of the tenants would have arrived to clean their car or check on stored property. The affable Mr Dudding would sidle up and, "being economical with the truth", pretend to be interested in renting another unit on the block. "I'd liberate four or five landlords' names on the Sunday, then on Monday I'd phone them all up," he explains.

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He admits the business has a darker side. Criminals have long favoured garages as hiding places for stolen goods; Mr Dudding says his company regularly discovers drug factories on his properties, and sometimes murder victims. As the biggest owner of lock-ups, he is in regular contact with the police, passing on information when illegal activity is suspected.

The quiet seclusion of many lock-ups also makes them a location for suicides, and Mr Dudding has himself encountered several victims. One lesson he learnt early on was never to open a car door with a body inside. On the single occasion when he did, the swollen body exploded. "It was most unpleasant," he says.

Perhaps the most eye-catching use for his properties is for extramarital liaisons. He remembers one instance where the company, during a routine check, discovered the tenant had constructed a room within the garage, complete with internal dry-lined brick walls, a double bed, carpet, gas heater and refrigerator. "It was his afternoon nooky shop - the first one I'd ever seen. It really tickled me," he says. For tenants with such needs, he jokes, a lock-up garage is cheaper and more anonymous than a hotel - and more stable than a caravan.

With thousands of clients, each typically paying £15 a week, it is a management-intensive business. He runs it "with a rod of iron", insisting on quarterly payments in advance and evicting those who fail to pay, retaking possession of their lock-up. But the discipline appears to pay off. "We have a bad-debt situation of only £25,000 a year off a rental income of probably £10m a year," he says.

Since he has a virtual monopoly in some areas - he says his nearest rival has 800 garages - could he not set any price he likes? He prefers a pragmatic approach, fixing a rent that people are likely to be able to pay and which will therefore help keep his sites 100 per cent occupied. "A partly let site will precipitate damage and vandalism."

Known as "RD" to his staff, Mr Dudding eschews computers, preferring to dictate emails to his secretary. It does not appear to have hindered his dealmaking, however. He runs a development business alongside the garages, building between five and25 properties a year on the lock-up sites. He would do more but for the planning authorities.

"I'm about to build some houses in Crouch End. It's taken me 12 years to get consent and probably cost me £100,000 in fees."

Unlike most brownfield developers, though, he ensures his assets are working for him while he waits. "Whether it takes one year or 10 to get planning consent, I've got an income through the garages," he says.

Even as a child he displayed an instinct for business. Growing up amid postwar austerity, he bred rabbits and sold them to the local butcher. By the time he started an apprenticeship with the Royal Navy, his various moneymaking activities had earned him £300, "which in today's parlance is about £10,000".

Though widowed earlier this year after 53 years of marriage, the indefatigable Mr Dudding is unlikely to retire to the property he bought some years ago in West Palm Beach, Florida. "I've only been there twice," he says. "For me, holidays are for wimps."

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