QE old boy Akshay Ruparelia has been making national and international headlines with the success of his online estate agency.
Akshay (OE 2009–2016), who was featured on this website during the summer, has seen his business go from strength to strength: many reports, including a piece in the Daily Mail, focused on doorsteps.co.uk’s current valuation of £12m and that it reportedly became the 18th-biggest estate agency in the UK this week.
Journalists also pointed to his age – Akshay is 19 – with the Daily Mirror, for example, citing Akshay’s belief that he is Britain’s youngest self-made business millionaire.
Reports focused on how Akshay’s experiences at QE, which he left only last year, had influenced him. Mirror reporter Jeremy Armstrong wrote that his School friends had nicknamed him Alan Sugar and that the idea for doorsteps.co.uk came to him while he was preparing for his financial studies examinations when he read a biography of Ryanair founder Michael O’Leary. “Mr O’ Leary began by selling flights for just £4.99 and his point was that if you deliver what you say you will, you hook people in and your business will work. So I took that same logic and applied it to estate agency. Research showed online estate agencies were still charging homeowners between £800 and £1,000. I knew I could do it for a fraction of that.”
Indian broadcaster NDTV stressed Akshay’s ethnic background under the hea dline, “Indian-origin teenager, 19, is UK’s youngest millionaire”. Many journalists also reported his family circumstances: Akshay’s parents – his 57-year-old father Kaushik, who is a care worker, and 51-year-old mother, Renuka, a teaching assistant – are both deaf.
Notwithstanding his paper wealth, Akshay has yet to “cash in” personally and does not, for example, own a car because of the high cost of insurance for him. Instead, he says he is focusing on growing the business, which is reported to have sold £100m-worth of properties and to have more than 1,000 homes for sale on its website.