Has the West Midlands got daddy issues?

The Black Country’s ‘king of the bedsits’ has sold up. But who will fill the void?

By Jack Walton

“We got lumbered with 475 units in the Midlands. And they were owned by a guy who called himself HMO Daddy.. And he was just sharp — he was like a Rachmanite-type landlord. He was outrageous. And he sold them…”

On a muffled and secret recording, a group of men discuss a recent deal. The man speaking is Peter Mitchell, a former Labour councillor in Liverpool and the head of Big Help Homes, a social housing charity running food banks before rapidly expanding. The man he’s referring to is Jim Haliburton. Or, as he’s better known: the HMO Daddy.  

For years, Haliburton has been the West Midlands’ “king of the bedsits” (or so the Express & Star dubbed him in a 2014 interview); a self-made man whose Black Country HMO empire made him one of the region’s biggest private landlords. But here, Mitchell refers to the purchase of “475 units” (roughly 100 properties in total) from the Daddy. Big Help don’t purchase their properties directly: rather they lease them from a property fund called Home REIT. Nonetheless, it suggests the king of the bedsits is moving on. While the sale of lots of bedsits from one landlord to another might not sound like the most riveting news, what appears to be playing out in the crackled audio is a passing of the torch. 

On the tape, Mitchell refers to the Daddy as a “Rachmanite” type landlord, a reference to the notorious Polish-born Peter Rachman, whose name is synonymous (and quite literally written into the dictionary) with the exploitation and intimidation of tenants.

Peter Mitchell of Big Help Homes.

Whether this is fair or not is open to interpretation; Haliburton, with his trademark baggy suit and hangdog expression, appears to fit the typical old-school landlord stereotype. His references to the lucrative “black-bagger” market (a term used to describe husbands booted out by their wives looking for a cheap room Haliburton can provide) certainly aren’t the most PC and he’s had his share of run-ins with council planning committees over the years.

But while the Rachman tag might seem an obvious one, beyond some unusual ducking and diving on Companies House (his date of birth appears to shift between 1951 and 1952 and his name is sometimes Charles James Haliburton and sometimes James Charles Haliburton) there’s nothing to suggest anything is untoward with the Daddy.

What is of interest is his massive personal success — at one time, Haliburton had more than 1000 tenants across the Midlands. I wondered: What does this success and the growth of the company that will take his place — Big Help Homes — tell us about the market in which they both operate? And how is the UK’s failing housing market shaping the average standard of properties available to West Midlands renters?