New homes, dirty money: who’s really buying Britain’s new-builds?

In 2021, two executives linked to the Prince Group bought 27 flats in two of London’s best-known new developments, Embassy Gardens in Battersea and Centre Point in the West End. The Prince Group, a Cambodian business empire, has since been sanctioned by the UK and US over human trafficking, fraud and corruption. Warning signs about the group were already public when the flats were bought, but the sales went through anyway. Today all 27 are frozen by UK authorities.

This is not a one-off. Since 2016, we’ve identified over 2,000 properties worth more than £16 billion bought with suspicious wealth. Our new report, Concerning Developments, finds that more than a third of them – 708 properties worth £2.2 billion – are new-build homes or development sites. They are spread across more than 150 locations, from London and the South East to Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool, and involve more than 85 developers. Because our data only captures cases we can see, the real figure is almost certainly higher.

Why new-builds?

Many new homes are sold “off-plan”, before they are finished. That suits people looking to hide money. They can buy several flats at once, spreading their funds across smaller purchases that attract less attention. They can sell a flat on before it is completed, which means their name never appears on the public land register. And because developers often rely on early sales to pay for construction, there is little appetite for awkward questions.

Three gaps in the system

Developers don’t have to ask. Estate agents, banks and lawyers must all check who their customers are and where their money comes from. Developers selling their own homes don’t. Around three in four developers aren’t registered with any anti-money laundering supervisor. Bangladesh’s former land minister built up a UK portfolio worth £170 million, including almost 300 new-build properties, on a declared salary of about £10,000 a year. His assets were frozen by the National Crime Agency in 2025. He says he is the target of a politically motivated campaign.

The gatekeepers have divided loyalties. Developers often steer buyers towards a “panel” of law firms, and sometimes pay buyers’ legal fees. Those firms are meant to check the source of buyers’ money, but they also depend on developers for future work. In some developments, hundreds of sales go through just one or two firms. At Elephant Park in south London, built on the former Heygate Estate, all the early off-plan sales we examined were handled by a single firm. Nineteen flats there bought by companies owned by a man wanted in China over illegal gambling have now been frozen. He denies the charges.

Selling abroad brings higher risk. With one-bedroom flats in London often starting around £400,000, many developers market new homes overseas through foreign-language websites and sales events. That brings in money from countries with higher levels of corruption, where there is often little free press and few public sources to check a buyer’s background.

Why this matters now

The Government wants to build more homes, and it should. But new homes need to house people, not serve as a safe place to store suspicious wealth. Every flat bought with dirty money is one that isn’t meeting the needs of the people who live and work here.

What needs to change

The first step is the simplest. Big developers should have to check who they are selling to, just as estate agents, banks and lawyers already do. The Government is about to consult on widening the money laundering rules, and bringing developers into scope would close the most obvious gap in the system.

But developers are only part of the picture. The lawyers handling these sales are already required to carry out checks, and the problem is that the people supervising them can’t see where the risks lie. Supervisors don’t know which firms sit on developer panels, or which are acting for higher-risk buyers from overseas. Asking firms to report both each year would let supervisors focus their limited resources on the transactions most likely to go wrong, rather than spreading them thinly across thousands of firms.

None of this would stop an honest buyer from getting a home. It would simply mean someone in the chain is asking the questions that should have been asked all along. Recent asset freezes show that law enforcement is catching up, but seizing property years after the money has landed is slow and costly. If the new homes going up across the country are meant to help solve the housing crisis, the better answer is to stop dirty money getting through the door in the first place.