SUPERSTAR Ed Sheeran joined the scramble to snap up properties during lockdown – splashing £4million to take his empire to a whopping £65 million.
Not bad for a kid who once slept rough in front of Buckingham Palace and rode the tube to catch some shut-eye when he had nowhere else to go.
But the 30-year-old did lose £500,000 on his struggling bar and eatery Bertie Blossoms during the worst of the pandemic lockdowns after he refused to plug into the government’s furlough scheme and funded staff wages from his own pocket.
And Ed spoke of the struggle of running a boozer, revealing: “It’s had a rocky start as it opened two months before the pandemic…if you’re looking to make a small fortune in the food industry you should start with a large fortune
“It’s one of these things where, unless you’re Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay and you have loads of restaurants, it’s very difficult.”
New books for two of that firms that control his monster portfolio show that he added property worth £994,342 to Maverick Commercial Properties Ltd during 2020 taking the value of its bricks and mortar to £2.5m.
And Maverick Properties Ltd now has investment properties worth £33.5m after he added a further £3.012m of buildings.
Ed owns a London mansion and a country estate.
And the singer – worth an estimated £220 million – has paid cash for many of the buildings because he didn’t want to take out a string of mortgages.
But Maverick Properties shows borrowings of £37m – believed to have been taken out against his other firms rather than high-street lenders.
He paid £20 million for his house in London’s trendy Notting Hill, plus the two neighbouring properties for £4 million and £1.5 million for his restaurant Bertie Blossoms on Portobello Road.
Ed also splashed out £4 million for five houses to create his Sheeranville estate in his home town in rural Suffolk – slapping down £895,000 for the first one in 2012.
In total, he owns around 25 properties in London, plus his Suffolk pads.
I didn’t have anywhere to live for much of 2008 and the whole of 2009 and 2010, but somehow I made it work
Some of the homes were purchased through Maverick Properties, the company Ed set up in 2015 with manager Stuart Camp, and others the star bought in his own name.
Other places include properties at Covent Garden in central London and a pair of flats next to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in south London.
Ed’s 2019 Divide tour turned over £600 million – not bad for a busker from Suffolk who was often homeless as he tried to make it big in London.
The Sun previously revealed how Ed splashed out £4million on new houses to stop his neighbours moaning about the noise.
He snapped up two houses next to his £19.8m London mansion to halt any complaints.
A source said at the time: “Ed’s had neighbours grumbling about noise before so when he got a chance to buy up the two houses next to his London home, he jumped at the chance.”
RAGS TO RICHES
Ed – who has recently become a dad for the first time after wife Cherry Seaborn gave birth to daughter Lyra – is currently living at his Suffolk estate.
The grounds consists of an £850,000 modern home, a 16th century farmhouse he bought for £450,000, a £925,000 four bed house also on the property, a £525,000 bungalow and a pub he built himself in 2017.
In his book A Visual Journey, Ed described how he bedded down close to Buckingham Palace and slept on the London Underground.
He wrote: “I didn’t have anywhere to live for much of 2008 and the whole of 2009 and 2010, but somehow I made it work. I knew where I could get a bed at a certain time of night and I knew who I could call at any time to get a floor to sleep on. Being sociable helped. Drinking helped.
“I spent a week catching up on sleep on Circle Line trains. I’d go out and play a gig, wait until 5am when the Underground opened, sleep on the Circle Line until 12, go to a session – and then repeat.
"It wasn’t that bad. It’s not like I was sleeping rough on the cold streets.”
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