It’s now clear why former  Secretary of State for Housing Sajid Javid always seemed to be so well briefed about the private rental market.

The  new Home Secretary, who was last week replaced by James Brokenshire at the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government (DHCLG), has a brother who is a director of several property firms including a letting agency.

Atif Javid was a lawyer in Bristol at legal firm Burgess Salmon before establishing a lettings agency in the city called Intire, which has been running for at least ten years.

Atif (pictured) is a busy entrepreneur and is also developing a national lettings portal for landlords and tenants called Landlord First and a rooting app for android phones.

But Intire is the largest of his businesses and has six staff and is based in the northern Downend area of Bristol.

Atif has made a small fortune from both investing in property and running his various businesses, it was claimed by the Daily Mail over the weekend.

43-year-old Atif has fingers in several other property pies including a landlord software company called Landlord Hub and a property development and investment firm called SA Capital.

Housing policy

Atif hasn’t always agreed with his brother on Tory housing policy, and in a blog published two years ago on his Intire website, one of his staff criticised the Tories for their clamp-down on landlords and in particular the additional Stamp Duty now due on investment and second homes.

Sajid Javid has five brothers all of whom have excelled in their fields of expertise including, as well as Atif, a Chief Constable (Basit), a mortgage broker (Khalid) and a supermarket chain manager called Tariq.

Sajid Javid, whose father and mother arrived almost penniless in the UK from the Punjab in 1961, took over from Amber Rudd at the Home Office after she resigned from her post after admitting to having “inadvertently” misled MPs over targets for removing illegal immigrants.