A COLCHESTER born entrepreneur who went from washing cars to collecting classic Ferraris has been named on the Sunday Times Magazine rich list.

Billionaire property entrepreneur Jon Hunt is the fifth wealthiest person in the East of England. 

He ranked in at 120th on the list for the UK, up four places on the 2023 list.

Mr Hunt’s has £1.424billion to his name but this was a loss of £24million since the previous year. 

The 76-page 2024 special edition of the Sunday Times Magazine reveals the wealth of the 300 richest people in Britain.

This year's edition reveals the largest fall in the billionaire count in the guide’s 36-year history, from a peak of 177 in 2022 to 165 this year.

Mr Hunt, 70, was born in Colchester and began his property career when he was just 19, after borrowing a £100 deposit to buy a one-bedroom flat in Woking for £4,500.

Two years later, he sold the property for £7,750.

Mr Hunt was born in June 1953 in Colchester into an Army family and was awarded a scholarship to Millfield boarding school.

He left after ‘O’ levels to join the army, passing basic training for the Royal Artillery, where his father had been a colonel.

Mr Hunt left the army in Canada and spent some time washing cars in Ottowa, Canda, before returning to Britain and securing a job at a Guildford-based estate agency.

In 1981, a 28-year-old Mr Hunt set up his firm, Foxtons, for which he is best known, with school friend Anthony Pelligrinelli in a small converted Italian restaurant in Notting Hill.

In May 2007, Mr Hunt sold Foxtons to private equity group BC Partners for £375 million and has since made significant investments into commercial and residential property in central London.

More recently, Mr Hunt is known as the founder of Pavilion, a business members’ club in Kensington High Street.

He has also launched and developed Wilderness Reserve, an area of restored natural lakes, parkland and woods situated in Suffolk’s Yox Valley.

Mr Hunt owns a property in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, known as London’s most expensive street, where he plans to house his collection of vintage cars  and is as a known collector of classic Ferraris.

Robert Watts, compiler of the Sunday Times Rich List, said: “This year’s Sunday Times Rich List suggests Britain’s billionaire boom has come to an end.

"Many of our home-grown entrepreneurs have seen their fortunes fall and some of the global super rich who came here are moving away. 

“Thousands of British livelihoods rely on the super-rich to some extent. We’ll have to wait and see whether we have now reached peak billionaire, and what that means for our economy."