St John’s College, along with Christ Church, Oxford, lost £700,000 in the 18 months following their purchase of an historic estate in 2023.

This includes a £450,000 reduction in the estate’s market value as well as expensive renovation works, financial statements show.

Land registry documents show Parlington LLP, a joint venture between John’s and Christ Church, purchased the 1,700-acre Parlington Estate in West Yorkshire for £30 million in December 2023. This was at least £10 million more than it had been valued at by its previous owner, according to the Association of Real Estate Funds.

Since then, property services firm Savills has revised down the estate’s market value by almost £450,000, according to Parlington LLP’s accounts. While these accounts do not provide a detailed breakdown of the estate’s valuation, they do suggest it is primarily based on rental income from the small number of historic properties on the estate.

One of the estate’s largest properties, a four bedroom house, was renovated in 2013 and is currently rented out at £2,950 per month. Since December 2024, the colleges have submitted applications to refurbish six other properties, which would incur significant expenses. An unredacted quote submitted in one application suggests the cost of installing 49 “high-performance timber windows” in four properties could exceed £150,000.

These costs partly explain Parlington LLP’s losses of almost £700,000 – £350,000 per college. The colleges’ financial statements indicate these losses have been deducted from their endowment funds, used for scholarships and charitable donations.

The considerable premium paid by the colleges to acquire the Parlington Estate could represent its ‘hope value’, an increase based on the likelihood of future development.

Renshaw Watts, a former independent consultant to the estate’s previous owners, the M&G UK Property Fund, said the company launched a marketing campaign to sell the estate in January 2023. They told Varsity that this involved a “significant number of other interested parties,” though they declined to identify the would-be buyers.

However, M&G had already spent around a decade unsuccessfully attempting to develop the estate. Early planning discussions started in the 1990s, commencing “in earnest” around 2015, Watts said.

M&G submitted its first formal proposal for ‘Parlington Village’ to Leeds City Council in 2016. Although the council initially approved the plan, it later backtracked in the face of local activism, as well as heritage and environmental considerations.

The reaction of John’s students has been mixed. One postgraduate student expressed “confusion” at the “wildly risky and irrelevant” spending. Another said he was “curious” about a possible renewable energy installation on the estate, and did not deem the investment “massively controversial”.

Parlington sits in the rural outskirts of Leeds. The estate rose in prominence after being transformed by the prominent Gascoigne family, who developed mines and agriculture on the land from the 16th century onwards. Much of the estate was designated a grade II Registered Park and Garden by Historic England in 2017.

John’s Master Heather Hancock has held numerous senior roles involving rural land management, including non-executive board member at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

Hancock and her husband are also non-executive director and chairman, respectively, of Yorkshire-based land consultancy Rural Solutions, which has participated in planning consultations in villages located near Parlington. Approached for comment, Parlington LLP denied consulting either Hancock or Rural Solutions in relation to the purchase.

All relevant parties were contacted for comment.