In Notting Hill a serene garden square reveals a startling trend: most houses stand empty. Is it tax changes, market timing or something more sinister?
By Melissa York
There’s a serene garden square in Notting Hill surrounded by majestic three-storey double-fronted homes. The driveways are as bare as the trees on a cold wintry morning, and many of the windows shuttered.
“It started to empty out just before Christmas and it’s getting emptier by the day,” says one of the homeowners. Of 15 houses she suspects only three of them are occupied. “You can get a parking space on the street easily these days whereas you couldn’t before. It’s very noticeable. The lights are on in all the houses because they’ve shut it up but left their housekeepers and live-in staff to look after it,” she says.
“It’s not just Notting Hill,” she insists. “It’s large parts of Kensington as well. We know quite a lot of people in the area who have left. It’s all about taxation.” To underline her point, she says one of her friends has just bought a house in Kensington from a couple who are off to low-tax Dubai.
It is a phenomenon across the capital’s most expensive neighbourhoods from Hampstead in the northwest to Chelsea in the southwest. A combination of tax changes – it is estimated that Britain lost a net 10,800 millionaires to migration last year — a stagnant luxury property market and a wet winter means thousands of high-end homes are empty for the best part of a year.
Almost a million homes in England, or 1 in 25 properties, are not lived in regularly, data from the Action on Empty Homes campaign shows. Of these, 256,061 have been empty for six months or longer, 4,000 more than last year, and the number of long-term empty homes are now at their highest level since 2011. Some 279,870 homes are not used as the owner’s primary residence, up 6.3 per cent since 2023.
The situation is not likely to improve anytime soon. Next month non-dom status will be abolished and replaced with a residence-based regime that means foreign earnings will be subject to UK inheritance tax rules.
Meanwhile many of Britain’s comfortable middle classes —not only the international wealthy — are also toying with the idea of a move motivated by Labour’s tax hikes (both real such as the inheritance tax on pensions and anticipated, higher capital gains tax being of key concern).
Overseas estate agents all report an uptick in inquiries from British buyers about leaving. Malta, Milan, Switzerland and Italy are popular options, although they report that many Brits are just exploring their options for now.
“It is mostly about a potential move, especially for the British clients. Non-British clients are more likely to be more globally mobile,” says Alex Koch de Gooreynd, a partner in international sales at Knight Frank estate agency.
“They all say to me that they don’t have an issue paying tax but they do have an issue paying inheritance tax on their worldwide assets. They look at Portugal and Switzerland, where there is zero inheritance tax and it looks attractive.”
Back in Notting Hill, on Clarendon Road, the only resident who was home to answer the door thinks the silent streets have more to do with demographics and drizzle than non-doms.
Bouncing a baby on her hip, she says: “A lot of [the homeowners] around here are international — Europeans, Americans — and they are very wealthy people who have two or three homes to go to. It’s like they live in a parallel universe.”
Alexander Litos, who mans the front desk at One Click Dry Cleaning near Notting Hill Gate Tube station, is also unfazed. “It’s very seasonal around here,” he says. “We wouldn’t notice whether anyone had left until the summer months leading up to when the children go back to school in September.”
Whether it’s tax, the weather or overseas buyers, smart neighbourhoods in central London are littered with properties that are empty for large parts of the year.
Unsold for years
Unrealistic pricing by super-rich sellers is another reason homes are unoccupied, as they languish on a stagnant London property market, waiting for sales that never happen for years. These very rich residents don’t have any financial need to sell — so they keep homes on the market at unrealistic prices, often for years.
On Grosvenor Crescent Mews, an ultra-exclusive cobbled cul-de-sac protected by a security checkpoint and a short horse guard’s gallop from Buckingham Palace, there’s a four-bedroom, four-storey house that is being sold by the Indian tea billionaire Rishi Sethia and his wife, Queenie Singh. They bought it for £9.5 million in the autumn of 2020, but have never spent a single night there and put the house on the market in November 2023 for £13 million. They have now reduced the price to £10.99 million. It has been unoccupied for at least five years.
“We had a couple of bids around the £11.5 million mark. I bet now they wish they’d taken them, but here we are, you know, a year on…” says Paul Finch, head of new homes at the estate agency Beauchamp Estates, as he walks around the neighbourhood.
Finch says homes in Knightsbridge and Belgravia have had a particularly slow year because many of them require significant upgrades, which buyers don’t want to do. “If they’re coming from overseas, they just don’t want the hassle of doing the work,” he says.
He walks down Lyall Street, where numerous large whitewashed homes are sitting unsold on Beauchamp’s books.
One sprawling property has been empty since a Turkish family paid £14 million for it in 2017, and he says it is now in a poor state. The family bought it with the intention of doing it up and moving there to coincide with their son starting university. But in the end they bought their son a £10 million flat somewhere else in London and never moved in.
Finch says: “It is still sitting here now and they’re saying, ‘Well, we want £20 million for it.’ You’re not going to get £20 million for it. It’s not going to happen.”
Asked what will make them change their mind, he says they don’t need to sell if they don’t want to because they’re so wealthy. “They’ll just sit on it until they have an epiphany, or somebody mad as a box of frogs comes along and pays their price.”
A society mansion, once owned by the gambling tycoon Lord Aspinall, then by the Delevingne family (including the models Cara and Poppy), and now owned by a British billionaire, has sat on the market unsold for 15 months.
The 5,456 sq ft house in Belgravia, with animal print walls and gold gilded ceilings, was originally listed for £23.5 million when it came on to the market early last year. Finch persuaded the billionaire to drop his price to £21 million at the start of this year, and there have been a few viewings since but no sign of a sale.
Frequently the problem is caused by agents who cynically overvalue homes just to flatter their super-rich clients and get a commission. A 2,674 sq ft, three-bedroom duplex penthouse at Eaton Place — previously the London home of Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, who died in 2022 — was listed for sale this month by her estate. Several agents quoted valuations of £8 million, £10 million and £12 million, says Finch, but he advised a more realistic price of £6.95 million and suggested a makeover by an interior designer — responding to the slowness of the market. The estate went ahead with Beauchamp’s more realistic price — discounting being crucial in this market — but all too frequently this doesn’t happen.
An empty home’s industry
Behind their bolted doors there is a whole army of service staff keeping these houses running. Camilla Dell, founder of the property buying agency Black Brick, set up a Vacant Care division in 2007 after she called her clients to see how they were getting on with the new properties she had helped them buy only to discover they were staying in hotels on short visits to London.
“When I asked why they said it was because they knew their homes would not be ready for them — dusty, not fresh linen, no food in the fridge,” she says.
Spotting a savvy business opportunity, she offered them a service that would plump and primp the property for their impending arrival. All they have to do when they return is turn the key in the door then step inside a warm, clean home stocked with fresh groceries, flowers and wine.
The division has evolved; now called Prime Property Asset Management, Dell sends staff out to empty properties to make heating, plumbing, electrics and ventilation checks — and to make sure no unwanted pests have moved in in the owners’ absence.
If a pipe should burst, owners often can’t claim on their home insurance if they haven’t visited the property in months. “We look after one property in Knightsbridge worth in the region of £10 million and the insurance policy requires us to visit every week,” says Jason Wei, head of the property management division at Black Brick.
There are almost 50 properties on the agency’s maintenance books — 40 per cent of its clients signed up for its management service last year. Simple weekly visits are charged at an hourly rate, but larger homes with more complex requirements, such as smart home systems and swimming pools, cost owners “a few thousand to many thousands of pounds” a month to run while they’re away.
A live-in housekeeper typically costs between £17,000 and £22,000 a year, according to the jobs website Glassdoor — a costly way to keep the lights on if no one’s home.
Owners pay £120 plus VAT an hour to use service staff at Eccord, a buying and property management company in central London. Aside from maintenance, staff also pay the bills because some owners don’t want to give live-in staff access to funds in their absence.
Eccord manages about 30 properties, half of which are empty for part of the year, says Jo Eccles, its founder and managing director.
She adds: “Some of them will come to London for a couple of months in the summer because it’s too hot where they are, or they might be in town because they love watching the tennis at Queen’s, then they’ll go to Wimbledon, they’ll soak up Chelsea Flower Show, then they’ll be off again.”
Eccord will usually visit an empty property every 14 days to compile photographs, meter readings and other documents into a report for the homeowner.
Staff wandering in and out also deters burglars, an ever-present problem in prime postcodes. Eccles says, “With certain larger properties, we have key holding services in place. If an alarm gets triggered, someone will be at the property within 20 minutes. If it’s during working hours, we normally go. If it’s outside of working hours, the key-holding company will go.”
Growing security concerns are affecting London’s reputation as a “triple-A” destination by the very rich, experts say.
The non-dom tax issue, says George Azar, chairman and chief executive of Sotheby’s International Realty, United Kingdom, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, is “already embedded in the prices” — but there is a perception that crime is getting worse and policing is weak, especially among Middle Eastern owners.
“People are scared to wear their jewellery, their watches,” he says. “Today rich people, when they go into London in the summer, they have security with them. That means something is wrong with the country.”
Wealthy individuals may be spending less time in their London home as a result, but the profit to be made if they can just wait out this sluggish market means they are willing to pay through the nose to keep them empty.
“The problem is, if you’re worth a billion, having 20 million quids’ worth of assets just doing nothing — does it really matter?” Finch tells me.
For many luxury agents trying to sell long-since empty homes, waiting for super-rich sellers to see sense and drop the price is certainly a long game.
The Secret Agent on… empty homes
Houses and flats in central London postcodes often sit empty for most of the year. If you walk around Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Mayfair in the evening you won’t see many lights on. Case in point: One Hyde Park, dominating Knightsbridge but hardly ever lived in, going by the lights left off inside.
I sold a house in Belgravia in 2016 that was 10,000 sq ft. It was used as a garage (it came with a mews). My client, a Middle Eastern gentleman, had bought it four years prior as a turnkey property and simply parked his Rolls-Royce Phantom and Range Rover in the garage, but never spent a night there. He preferred a suite at the Dorchester.
It was only when one of his many advisers pointed out the threat of a mansion tax (mooted by a Labour government back in the days of Gordon Brown) that he decided to sell. It seemed he’d forgotten he owned it. Timing was on his side: the market had shifted in the right way, and he made a handsome profit.
My clients from the US can’t believe how little tax those with super-prime property pay. The highest rate of council tax in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea is less than £3,000 a year. And that’s for flats and houses worth tens of millions.
In New York or California or Illinois or Connecticut you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and city taxes to own properties of similar value. No wonder the internationally mega-wealthy aren’t too agitated about holding on to property in London despite the cost of insurance and staffing. After all, they need to put their money somewhere.
It’s an age-old quandary: we want the very rich to live here for the trickle-down effect, but we also want a vibrant city brimming with the life that only full-time residents can give it.
To paraphrase the French novelist Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” One could forgive the rich for their past … if only they made better neighbours in the present.
