INTERVIEW:Sarah Beeny has an awful lot going on, what with her property interests, television series, dating website, and the small matter of raising four sons, writes UNA MULLALLY
IT TAKES A BIT of effort to get hold of Sarah Beeny. First she’s in a meeting that’s running over time, then in her car about to pick someone up, and finally in her office at home in southwest London. While most relate Beeny to the glut of property and restoration programmes she has fronted, it’s her online entrepreneurial skill that has us talking.
Beeny is the woman behind mysinglefriend.com, a dating website that works on the premise that a person’s friends are better and more honest at describing their single friends than the singleton themselves. “I’ve always set people up over the years because, well, it’s kind of fun,” Beeny begins, “and I’ve often thought if I was single I’d want my friends to introduce me to people, because how often are you going to meet someone new? Part of it is me being a hideous control freak and meddling in other people’s lives. Then I figured I wanted to put my friend on a dating website, so we decided to build a website where you could put your friend on it.”
The idea was hatched in 2004. It launched shortly after, with eight profiles (eight of Beeny’s single friends) on the website. In has since amassed one million members in the UK. And now, the website is viewing the Irish market. Beeny proudly announces there are two Ireland-based members. “Well, if we launched in the UK with eight, we can launch in Ireland with two!” she cackles.
The simple ideas are the best, and Beeny has managed to create a new space in online dating away from websites that “make me picture dating agencies with women in buns wearing lots of tweed”, as Beeny puts it, to a more fun, fresher and rather logical space. After all, don’t friends set up friends all the time?
“There’s thousands of them now,” Beeny says of couples who have met on the website. She was at the Movember Gala the other week in London and says about 20 couples came up to her saying they met on the site. “I remember the first mysinglefriend baby . . .”
Beeny begins launching into a rather hilarious anecdote about meeting a married couple in a hospital with a baby on the mother’s hip. When they told her they had met on the website and the baby was born out of the subsequent relationship, she burst into tears: “They obviously regretted speaking to me, and must have been thinking, ‘Well, now we know why she’s in the hospital, because she’s MAD.’ And I just kept going on and on at them asking, ‘But would you have met anyway if this or this happened, perhaps would you have met on the bus?’ They wanted to leave, but I had them cornered by then,” she laughs, concluding, “Anyway!”
Just thinking about all Beeny has going on is quite exhausting, and that’s before you even touch on her restoration of Rise Hall in Yorkshire (also the subject of a Channel 4 series), raising four sons, and Tepilo, an online property website. “I suppose I’m quite easily bored to be honest. That doesn’t sound very good but it’s true,” she says.
“I have a mind that whirrs all the time. I went out for dinner last night and someone said ‘It must be so tiring being in your brain.’
“I’m not very good at sitting still. I need things to move a lot. My husband said it’s because my mother died when she was young [Beeny was 10 when her 39-year-old mother passed away from breast cancer] and I’m trying to ram everything in before I’m 40, but I’m nearly at 40 now.
“Having children has made me be quite focused on work and home,” she says, suddenly serious. Focused how? “I do things I wouldn’t normally do.” Like? “Well today I’m going to make chicken pie and a jam sponge for the boys because that’s their favourite thing at school. I just thought it’s a bit rubbish that that’s their favourite thing and I’ve never made it, so today I’m going to burn a chicken pie and a jam sponge and then they’ll probably eat a sandwich instead and that will be the end of my earth-mothering for the day.”
Back to property, she engages in a lengthy discussion about the creation of the buy-to-let market by mortgage firms, and the differences between the UK and Irish housing markets. “I know that in Ireland in terms of houses it’s...” she seeks a description, “a little bit f***ed. Which is not a nice way of saying it. Economically it is a bizarre situation. The difficulty this time around is because that debt was so easy to get, people were building houses almost to get the debt.
“It wasn’t based on demand, it was just based on the ability to get money from banks. This was slack lending.” She says developers will continue to make money, but ultimately “what you want as a developer is a nice, stable, flat market, so you know where you are. You don’t want it to rise and fall dramatically, floating up and down quickly so no one knows where they are – that’s all a bit scary,” adding there’s always going to be massive risks when large amounts of money are available.
“You never hear farmers going: ‘That was a cracking year, I’m going to buy loads of tractors and go to the Seychelles.’ ”
Does she feel at all complicit in the property bubble given that she was – and continues to be – the face of property television programming, along with the advice books that accompanied Property Ladder?
"People have asked me that: 'Do you feel responsible for the economic downturn?' Well, if Gordon Brown was watching me and taking his advice off Property Ladder, then I think we all got off rather lightly! So no, I don't think I'm responsible. I hope to God that I am not."
Beeny maintains she wasn't exactly encouraging about investing in property. "I was always the voice of doom and gloom. I was rather negative about it. I guess people who sit and watch telly – who watch Property Ladder– I don't think they jump up and start developing houses. They might just eat a bag of popcorn or something," she says. "It's a bit like me watching a programme about going on safari and thinking, 'Oh I'm going to do that.' Do I? No. I get up and I do the washing."
