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Ariel Anderssen, 49, has been in the adult industry for 25 years, and in that time she’s amassed a property portfolio that will make your eyes water.
She’s a sex worker in a looser sense of the word, fulfilling men’s niche requests on OnlyFans and raking in the cash as a bondage model.
‘Men typically come to me if they can’t find their kink represented widely in porn,’ Ariel tells Metro. ‘So, I’ve pretended to be eaten by a monster under the bed, and I do submissive stuff where I pretend to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.’
Charging £100 for a five-minute OnlyFans video, or £270 for 30-minutes, means she earned £228,000 last year. It’s enabled her to purchase eight properties so far, and she intends to purchase 11 in total.
And she’s just one of multiple sex workers future-proofing her income in this way, with OnlyFans creators telling Metro they’re buying up property for passive income.
Ariel bought her first flat in 2007 at 29 – a one-bedroom for £140,000 by the Tube station in Ealing. It’s now worth £260,000.
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‘I was just going to live in it but then I met my husband and after two years we bought a house together,’ Ariel explains. ‘I was scared my relationship wouldn’t work out because we hadn’t lived together before, so I rented the flat out instead.’
In the 20 years since, the flat hasn’t sat vacant for more than three days, and Ariel makes £1,1300 a month from the rent. ‘That was going to be my pension pot initially,’ she adds, ‘but then I thought living off £12,000 a year in retirement didn’t sound great – could I double it?’
So, in 2016, Ariel purchased a two-bed flat in Wolverhampton for £67,000 (now worth £90,000). But once she read a book on property investing, she set herself a challenge to buy one more flat every two years.
‘I’d always thought you need to get the smallest mortgage you can and pay it down, but the book said to do a 25% deposit, get an interest-only mortgage for the rest and keep buying properties,’ Ariel says. ‘It sounded terrifying but that’s what I started doing.
‘As you buy more, you can save the deposit for the next one much faster because of the rent coming in.’
The bondage model bought a two-bed maisonette in Telford in 2018 for £80,000 (now worth £105,000) and a two-bed flat in Barry, South Wales, for £127,000 in 2021 which is now worth £144,000.
When Covid hit people started buying more porn from Ariel, increasing her income and enabling her to buy her three most recent properties mortgage-free.
This includes two two-bed flats in Peterborough, the first bought for £105,000 in 2023 (now worth £120,000), and the second bought for £140,000 in 2024. Then Ariel took the plunge and bought a three-bed house in Newcastle for £68,000 in 2025 (worth £83,000 after renovations).
This is all in addition to her three-story Georgian home in the Welsh Borders, which she purchased with her husband for £300,000 11 years ago.
Why are sex workers building property portfolios, how easily can they get a mortgage?
Will Sharman, an MBNM mortgage broker, has assisted multiple self-employed individuals, including adult OnlyFans creators, in securing mortgages.
‘Wealthy creators buying property is a smart strategy,’ Will tells Metro. ‘OnlyFans income has a finite window and real platform risk. A policy change or algorithm shift can wipe earnings overnight.
‘Property offers passive income, capital growth, and a long-term asset that doesn’t depend on continued content creation. It’s exactly what any financial adviser would recommend to someone with high, front-loaded, volatile earnings.’
Sex workers can struggle to get mortgages though, because lenders want stable, verifiable income, according to Will. ‘OnlyFans income is unusual enough to trigger extra scrutiny under anti-money laundering rules, and some lenders have informal policies around industries they consider reputationally sensitive, which can mean a discreet decline.’
He adds: ‘But OnlyFans creators’ work is legal, the income is taxable, and they are entitled to exactly the same access to financial services as anyone else.
‘The friction they face isn’t a reflection of anything wrong with them. It’s institutions being slow to catch up with how people legitimately earn a living in 2026.’
‘I rent to people in need’
Dominatrix Melissa Todd, 49, also has eight properties to her name.
‘When I entered the sex industry aged 19, I liked to torture myself with worry about what on earth I’d do when I “got old”,’ Melissa tells Metro.
So, she began buying up property after charging her wealthy clients up to £20,000 for her sex worker services, which include spanking, bondage and ‘headmistress school’.
Her first purchase was when she was 19, before she entered the world of sex work, using money she made as a care assistant. It was a three-bed with a huge garage and garden for £41,000 in east Kent, where all her properties are, in Thanet and Medway.
Melissa buys her homes outright, which are collectively worth around £2,000,000, and she’s never had any issues purchasing with sex work funds. She currently has seven tenants in situ, but has previously let her properties to sex workers who find it harder to rent.
David Smith, partner and specialist in residential property law at Bishop & Sewell, tells Metro sex workers and OnlyFans models can struggle to rent because most residential tenancies have a clause prohibiting work or operation of a business from the property.
‘An Onlyfans model would find themselves at risk of breaching this if they were shooting films in the premises,’ he explains. ‘It’s common to find clauses prohibiting immoral use and, while such clauses were historically targeted at prostitution, they would likely be breached by filming sexual content as well.’
David adds courts have been harsh on sex workers and OF creators because they believe it’ll lead to the property’s reputation being ‘tainted’.
So Melissa helps out sex workers in a bind. ‘I also prefer to rent to people on benefits, the homeless, the self-employed,’ she explains. ‘Partly because I feel like a horrible human being for being so wealthy, and helping people makes me feel less guilty. I also charge vastly under market rates.’
In total, Melissa earns about £5,000 a month from her properties, but she has no plans to purchase other homes in the future – although she encourages other sex workers to do so.
‘Invest your cash while it’s coming in thick and fast,’ she adds. ‘It’s getting harder to make money from porn, and I suspect it will get harder still.’
‘Estate agents told potential buyers who I was’
Lily Phillips, who famously had sex with 101 men in a single day, has acquired two properties at the age of just 24 – one is her home in Cheshire and the other a rental property in Derbyshire, near her hometown.
‘I bought my rental property outright at 20 for £110,000,’ Lily tells Metro. ‘It’s a small house but I get £700 a month from it. I purchased it purely for investment purposes.’
She doesn’t disclose her identity to her tenants and it’s her parents who manage the tenancy for her.
But when Lily bought her £1,025,000 Cheshire home — a Georgian four-floor, five-bedroom house — with cash in July 2025, her privacy was invaded by estate agents.
She’d moved there after living in Kensington and Chelsea for three years, looking for somewhere ‘homey’ where she could walk her dog and not have to worry about getting any ‘trouble’.
‘When my neighbours moved in they told me the estate agent had said, “Lily Phillips is living next door, she’s a porn star, we need to disclose that for legal reasons”,’ Lily says.
Property lawyer David clarifies it’s legal to declare to a potential buyer that the neighbour is an OnlyFans model but giving their name is a breach of GDPR.
‘I question whether an agent should have disclosed this, it depends on what she was doing and whether it would affect them,’ David says. ‘Many agents massively over interpret their duties to disclose material information.’
Lily’s neighbours weren’t put off by it, but she was taken back by the invasion of her privacy.
‘It felt really invasive,’ she explains. ‘The buyers could’ve been anyone like a superfan who was obsessed with me and that’s why he wanted to move next door. It could’ve been someone who wanted to terrorise me, or who didn’t like what I do and wanted to make my life hell.
‘I found it ridiculous. I’m a normal human being, I just do an adult job. I don’t really work in the house. I’m not running around naked on the street. Everything is behind closed doors and in the privacy of my own home.’
So, is it time the property market caught up to sex workers and their budding property portfolios? Probably.
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