The missing £27 million: How Sourced left investors in the lurch

In April last year, Liverpool property developer Joanne Waller logged into her Facebook page. On the profile, Waller provides a brief bio of herself, which reads like a couplet of corporate poetry: 

“Turning ideas into homes, chaos to order;

Mother • Feminist • Property developer • Occasional hoarder”. 

Now she was updating the profile with photos from her latest holiday. A few months after that, she was off on her hols again: This time relaxing lakeside in an unspecified location, besides the Venetian balustrades and exotic foliage.

Back home in the UK, these posts received an unfortunate response. Indeed, among the community of investors who had plunged tens of millions into her company Sourced Development’s projects, many of whom had lost all hope of getting that money back, the reception was especially frosty. As one investor told The Post: “Your company has taken millions off innocent fucking people, and you’re living it up”.

Is this assessment fair? Stories of off-plan developments gone bad provide scant novelty to the Liverpool news cycle. During the Joe Anderson years in particular, this type of development — where buyers invest in a plan on the basis of CGI renders, as opposed to a completed building — became infamous. Names like Elliot Lawless and Peter McInnes will be recognisable to many readers. An estimated £1.26 bn worth of off-plan property has stalled or gone into administration in Liverpool, according to information received by investigative journalist Matt O’Donoghue in response to a Freedom of Information request in 2022.

But the story of Joanne Waller and Sourced deserves fresh attention. Over the past few weeks The Post have spoken to half a dozen individuals who have invested with Waller, and have uncovered serious concerns about potential conflicts of interest relating to a scheme that was meant to protect buyer’s money. 

The Post have also reviewed the accounts for Sourced and other associated companies, and have been unable to trace where this money has got to. In response to the allegations in today’s story, the law firm representing Waller told us she denies all allegations but refused to give us a full statement. 

Hello readers — it’s Abi here. Investigations like today's are never easy. They require hours of research, interviews, phone calls to legal experts and rigorous fact-checking to ensure we're giving you the clearest possible picture of what went wrong.

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