A VACANT house filled with rubbish sold well over its guide price, as four Council assets sold at auction to raise a combined £1m.

Each of the four assets that were auctioned by the Council on Tuesday and Wednesday sold for much more than the guide price – with one plot of land selling for 15 times the guide price.

It comes as Bradford Council aims to raise £100m by selling off over 150 properties and plots of land in a bid to avoid financial disaster.

The four Council-owned assets listed in the Pugh Property Auction were

  • 68 Scott Lane West, Riddlesden – a vacant semi-detached house. The listing shows that each room in the property is piled high with waste. The house had a £100,000 guide price, but eventually sold for £153,000.
  • Land at Fell Lane in Keighley – once the site of the now demolished Holme Wood Resource Centre. The 1.4 acre site had a guide price of £325,000, but sold for almost double that - £626,000.
  • 108 White Abbey Road, a vacant mid terrace house in the Manningham area, had a guide price of £65,000 but sold for £146,000.
  • And an 0.7 acre plot of land at Flappit Springs, off Halifax Road near Cullingworth, had a guide price of just £5,000. The lot eventually sold for 15 times that amount - £75,000.
  • The site at Flappit SpringsThe site at Flappit Springs (Image: Pugh)

If each property had sold for the guide price it would have brought £495,000 into the Council’s coffers.

At the end of the auction the properties had in fact sold for a total of £1m.

No details of any of the buyers have been disclosed.

At a meeting of Bradford Council’s Executive on Tuesday, members were given an update on the efforts to raise £100m through asset sales.

As part of “extraordinary financial support” provided to the Council to stave off bankruptcy, the authority was allowed to sell assets to help fund services.

Usually councils are only allowed to use income from asset sales on capital projects like new buildings – but not on funding services.

A report to the Executive said the £100m asset sales was a two year process.

It added: “So far £82m of assets have been identified for disposal, of which £1.1m has completed, £5.1m is with solicitors, £62.4m of assets are coming to the market, and £12.4m is in the pipeline to be marketed.

“The forecast split for these anticipated capital receipts is £49.6m in 2024-25 and £32m in 2025-26.

“Estates and Property services are preparing a significant number of properties to be auctioned in the following months.

“The remaining c£18m is planned to come from asset sales not yet identified.”