Featured in the Daily Express: How One Man Turned His Delivery Round into £3,000
- Simon Taylor
- Jun 10
- 2 min read
We're delighted that Empty Property Hunters has been featured in the Daily Express, telling the inspiring story of Hunter Paul Dixon, a Lincoln-based leaflet distributor who turned his eye for empty properties into a life-changing side hustle.
Paul, 49, began noticing just how many vacant homes he was passing on his daily rounds. Rather than ignore them, he started photographing and reporting them to us, earning £20 for every genuinely empty property he flagged.
When two of those homes were purchased, Paul received 1% of the purchase price and his earnings jumped to nearly £3,000 – enough to treat his wife Karen to a luxury trip to the Dublin Racing Festival, complete with a hotel suite, racing hospitality and a visit to the Guinness factory. Paul said:
"It mattered more because I made this money from my little side venture – and I wanted to make a memory with it."
The story highlights just how widespread the UK's empty homes problem has become. With more than one million empty residential properties in England (265,000 of which have been vacant for over six months) the scale of the issue is staggering. As Paul himself put it after spotting around 200 empty homes on a single weekend in Grimsby:
"There's a housing crisis, why can't anything be done about all these perfectly good existing properties? They're just sat there empty. It doesn't make sense."
Our founder, Simon, praised the growing network of spotters making this work possible:
"Empty properties are a blight on communities and a block on fixing the nation's housing crisis. We salute our army of spotters who are out there every day reporting empty homes to our team – helping improve peoples' lives and breathe new life into forgotten areas."
Anyone can get involved. All it takes is 30 seconds to photograph and report a vacant property, with the potential to earn £20 per report and 1% of the sale price if a home is purchased.
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