How gangs are turning middle-class landlords' houses into cannabis farms. They use fake IDs to con agencies, then rip down walls and dump tons of soil in every room. And victims say that's not even the worst part...

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It wasn’t until he found 10 tons of soil on a bedroom floor that Charles Reeves, 57, realised that the tenants in his £3million London home had turned it into a cannabis farm.

 ‘We had so many happy memories as a family in that house,’ he says. ‘But now they’ve been ruined. The growers completely wrecked the place and it’s cost £80,000 to repair. The experience has been very damaging — we feel utterly violated.’

But Charles’s horror story is by no means unique.

Kwex Nwachukwu, 40, found out his tenants were cannabis farmers when neighbours sent CCTV footage of two men, one with a machete, kicking down the front door of his £215,000 rental property in Birmingham.

Charles Reeves, 57, found 10 tons of soil on a bedroom floor in his £3million London home 

His neighbours told him that they had seen men acting suspiciously at the property 

And Melanie Ralph, living and working in Singapore with her family, couldn’t believe that the wealthy entrepreneur who rented her £1.6million oast house in Kent for £3,200 a month was really a cannabis grower who went on to cause £75,000 worth of damage.

These middle-class landlords are among increasing numbers being stung by seemingly innocent tenants, who provide sophisticated ID and references before taking over flats and houses and turning them into labs for growing vast quantities of marijuana.

Within days, the farmers usually dismantle the inside of the property, punching holes in walls and ceilings for electrical cables, ventilation and irrigation systems designed to make the plants grow as fast as possible.

A successful cannabis-farming operation in an average-sized family house could produce three crops a year, with an estimated street value of between £750,000 and £1 million.

But in the process, the house will be wrecked. It will carry the heavy smell of marijuana for years, while electrical and water meters will be bypassed, leaving the property in a highly dangerous condition.

‘Cannabis farms are being uncovered with depressing regularity in the UK and, where once they were generally in large scale industrial units, remote warehouses and disused farm buildings, the police are increasingly finding smaller-scale cannabis farms in residential rental properties on unremarkable suburban streets,’ says Suzy Hershman, head of dispute adjudication at MyDeposits, the government-authorised tenancy deposit protection provider.

‘Once the tenancy is secured, the criminal gangs move in, with homes often completely destroyed. Internal walls are frequently removed and floorboards ripped up to make room for hydroponics systems, high-intensity lighting and ventilation shafts, which all represent a major risk to the integrity of the property.’

There are no official figures for the number of cannabis farms operating from rented properties in the UK but, anecdotally, most in the sector agree they are on the rise. In London alone, police discovered 1,056 between 2018 and 2023, but this is likely to be only the tip of a very big iceberg, as most go undetected.

According to the Guild of Residential Landlords: ‘Around 90 per cent of the cannabis used in the UK is supplied from farms operating from rented homes.’

One of these belonged to Charles Reeves, a sound-mixing engineer who has worked with musicians such as Prince, UB40, Howard Jones, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Grace Jones.

Kwex Nwachukwu, 40, found out his tenants were cannabis farmers when neighbours sent CCTV footage of two men kicking down the front door of his rental property in Birmingham

 He and his wife, Julia, moved out of their four-bedroom Islington house, complete with a mixing studio, towards the end of the Covid pandemic. Julia’s parents in New York had been unwell and the couple wanted to be closer to them.

Tenants were found through a large letting agent and a £5,000-a-month contract was signed, valid for a year-and-a-half. That went well, but when that lease ended, the property was left empty.

‘Britain had slipped into a recession, so people were a little bit wary about spending money,’ says Charles. ‘The place was empty for about two months and we were getting nervous because it is very expensive to run.

‘Then, out of the blue, this small agency contacted us. They said they had the perfect tenant; his credit checked out, he had a great job and a small family. He just wanted to live closer to the City to be near work. And they offered us a really competitive rate.

‘We got his deposit, he moved in last June [2023], and then, nothing. No rent, no contact. Nothing.’

After a while, the ‘agent’ responded to emails from Charles to say that the ‘tenant’ had fallen on hard times. Charles offered to come to an arrangement but, again, nothing came back. It became clear that the ‘agent’ and ‘tenant’ were stalling.

‘My wife hired a private investigator and found that the letting agent’s website was fake, and the agent [who cannot be named for legal reasons] and the tenant were all part of the same group of people, so we began eviction proceedings,’ says Charles.

In January, he was granted legal possession of the property again and, in a manner he now accepts was risky, he went there and knocked on the door. He had previously walked past the house and begun to suspect something was very wrong — all the windows were blacked out.

His neighbours had told him that they had seen men acting suspiciously and one had been threatened after taking a photo. Eventually, after an hour of knocking, a man answered and Charles told him to leave immediately.

‘I said, “Just get your stuff and go right now, otherwise the police will be here to help you leave.” He was suddenly panicked and he and two other men came out, slammed the door behind them and ran down the street.’

The men, described by Charles as Albanian, had changed the locks. He called a locksmith, who took an hour to get into the house. What Charles found has left him emotionally scarred.

Melanie Ralph rented out her £1.6million house in Kent for £3,200 a month to what she thought was a wealthy entrepreneur

The cannabis grower caused £75,000 worth of damage to Melanie's award-winning oast house, designed by her father-in-law, architect George Ralph, in the 1980s

‘I stepped in and the first thing I noticed was all this heat and lots of loud fans all over the house,’ he says. ‘There were space heaters everywhere and wiring running up the stairwell. There was also a strong smell of weed.’

Charles even found footprints on walls. Then, at the entrance to an upstairs bedroom, he saw a tarpaulin on the door being sucked in by air pressure.

‘I pulled it back and there were hundreds of cannabis plants and all these grow lights suspended from the ceiling,’ he says. ‘There was ductwork, and weird plug and fuse boxes they had installed all over the place. Directly next door, which used to be my bedroom, there was 3ft of soil covering the floor. We worked out it weighed 10 tons. I didn’t even imagine it could take that weight.’

He says the bedroom of one of his two daughters had been lined with plastic and kitted out with lights, ready for more soil to be laid. There was £80,000 worth of damage to the infrastructure of the property, but his landlord’s insurance only covered £25,000.

‘We feel like we’ve been violated and the house has been defiled,’ says Charles. ‘My connection to my home is very different now because it feels like the place was stolen from me, even though I still own it. The house that was ours has been taken away for ever.’

Charles says he wishes he had made his own credit checks on his ‘tenant’, rather than relying on a letting agent that turned out to be bogus, but he was in New York and the previous tenancy had run smoothly; he had no reason to suspect the next one wouldn’t.

Unfortunately for landlords, insurance companies will often not pay out for damage caused by cannabis farming if it transpires that proper credit and reference checks weren’t carried out before the property was let.

‘It’s crucial to have comprehensive landlord insurance that covers malicious damage by tenants or their guests, as most standard policies exclude cover if the damage results from a cannabis farm,’ says Steve Barnes, head of broking at Total Landlord Insurance.

Melanie Ralph had used a letting agent to check on a prospective tenant for the oast house that her father-in-law, architect George Ralph, had designed in the 1980s, winning an award for it in 1994.

It had been sold but was bought back by Melanie and her family as a place to return to following nine years living in Singapore where they ran a business consultancy.

In the meantime, a letting agent was employed to find a tenant and came up with the ‘CEO’ of his own company. Melanie’s property maintenance agent, Mark North of Trust Property Maintenance Services, says the tenant supposedly provided evidence of identity and income to the letting agent — but they turned out to be bogus.

Melanie’s brother-in-law, Garry Ralph, became suspicious when the new tenant declined a meeting so Mark could show him how everything in the property worked. When he noticed later that the windows had been blacked out, he attempted to make contact with the tenant but he refused to come to the front door.

A cannabis-farming operation in an family home could produce three crops a year, with an estimated street value of between £750,000 and £1million

After several weeks of trying to gain lawful entry, they got in and were shocked to find one of the rooms carpeted in soil, while holes pockmarked the walls and ceilings, cannabis leaves lay on the floor and entire rooms were sealed and taped up ready for plants.Also, supports in the conical oast house roof had been removed to provide ventilation for the plants.

‘We were devastated by the damage,’ says Melanie. ‘Repairing it has cost us tens of thousands of pounds, and it is still not fully restored. We suspect that criminals target properties where the landlord lives abroad, like us.’ Her advice for landlords would be to do their own credit searches. ‘After carrying out a few basic checks that took us a few minutes, we discovered that the tenant’s company had only been established for a few months, contrary to his claims of years of employment,’ she says. ‘The agent hadn’t even checked for a company website — simple steps that could have raised red flags.’

In spite of what her family has been through, Melanie remains stoic. ‘We’re incredibly proud of my father-in-law’s achievement with the house, and we refuse to let the vile criminals who tried to trash it ruin its legacy,’ she says.

The National Residential Landlords Association has identified warning signs that might indicate cannabis farmers are trying to rent a property. It says they are often overly eager to pay several months’ rent up front, especially in cash. They want the tenancy to start immediately after suggesting that references are an unnecessary expense, and they request complete privacy.

Once they have moved in, they refuse inspections, deny access to the property, fail to respond to communications, change locks and install security systems without asking permission.

IT solutions consultant Kwex Nwachukwu was stung after becoming involved in a ‘rent-to-rent’ scheme, whereby his tenant, or ‘property manager’, was allowed to sub-let his three-bed property in Birmingham room by room to maximise income, which would be shared. Unfortunately, his property manager inadvertently let it to some cannabis farmers.

‘He told me at one point that there was a problem, but he was sorting it out,’ says Kwex. ‘He contacted the police, but later the growers smashed in the door to retrieve their equipment. When the manager stopped replying to the police, they called me, and that’s when I found out the full extent of what was going on.’

His property manager — who was not involved in the cannabis operation — panicked and gave the property back to Kwex, leaving him with a £15,000 repair bill. It is hardly surprising that he got scared. Neighbours have sent Kwex CCTV footage of two men arriving at the property in an apparent dispute over the cannabis grown inside.

‘One of them has a machete and they’re trying to kick down the front door,’ he says. ‘Then they try to get in through the back door. As they do, two growers in bare feet run out the front door. They’re literally running for their lives.

‘The neighbour called the police. If the criminals hadn’t had that argument, they could still be there growing today.’

The police say they take the scourge of cannabis farming in rented properties very seriously. Chief Constable Richard Lewis, drugs lead for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, says: ‘Policing will always pursue offenders, but it is equally important that communities work with us and share information about what they see, hear and find suspicious.’

However, some of the victims I talked to disagree that the police ‘will always pursue offenders’. When Metropolitan police officers came to Charles Reeves’s home, he offered them film he had taken of one of the growers and pointed out beer bottles, clothes, debris — even a diary — that could have provided DNA and fingerprint evidence, but none was taken away.

The police say they take the scourge of cannabis farming in rented properties very seriously

He heard nothing from the police for six months, until his story was featured on a BBC news report. ‘I was called by a detective sergeant who knew nothing about all this forensic evidence and very little about my case,’ says Charles.

Similarly, when Met police went to Melanie’s house in Bromley, property manager Mark showed them lots of items that could have provided DNA or fingerprint evidence. The police did not take any of them away. All the family received was a crime number and there has been no contact since.

‘There have been no repercussions for the people who ruined our property and we have been left to foot the bill completely,’ says Melanie.

I asked the Met police why potentially vital forensic evidence wasn’t gathered, and whether it took such criminality seriously. A spokesman said: ‘We are dedicated to tackling drug dealing, prioritising community concerns, and making London safer.

‘Our response in Bromley fell short of expected standards and we apologise to the victim for the service they received. We will be reopening the case and contacting them. Officers continue to investigate the incident in Islington — enquiries remain ongoing and we will update the victim.’

It is certain these victims will not be the last, for while cannabis remains a lucrative crop, growers will cast an envious eye over large, empty properties.