One of the most respected buying agents in London says buy to let in the capital is losing its appeal for many investors.
Camilla Dell, founder and managing partner of Black Brick Property Solutions, says in a review of 2021 that while she is seeing an upturn in demand for apartments, buyers are far more discerning than before the pandemic.
“Outside space and proximity to a good local high street are top of buyers wish lists. We are seeing a very tough market for sellers of ex-rental stock located in older new builds, some with cladding issues and which are poorly located and without outside space. There is no market for them, no matter how cheap they become.”
Dell continues: “Unfortunately, not all apartments will make the London-wide comeback a lot of sellers are hoping for. Buy To Let has lost its attraction for many private landlords, meaning ex-rentals are flooding the market with an added surge in apartment listings; supply is at an all-time high, while demand is selective and lacking.
“So unfortunately, unless apartment listings are located near green space, and a great high street they are likely to be difficult to shift.”
Looking ahead to the rest of 2022 Dell believes prime central London will see an influx of interest gravitating back towards the city, as the race for space loses momentum.
And she says there is one area of London at the forefront of interest – Bayswater.
“It is a unique part of London offering inner-city living, with competitive pricing and proximity to green space, reassuring buyers that they can enjoy the outdoors, when some apartments do not have their own outside space.”
And she concludes: “Bayswater is the one to watch. Having previously been considered a less desirable area, compared to its more swanky neighbours, it is becoming increasingly desirable. Buyers are comfortable returning to apartment living, as Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens offer the reassurance of nearby public outside space for those buying a property without a private garden, patio or balcony. Although restrictions have eased, it is likely the pandemic will have a lasting effect on buyers, leading them to permanently consider outside space in their criteria when purchasing in London.”
A leading buying agency says that while prime central London’s property market shows clear signs of recovery, a weak area remains apartments without outside space.
Camilla Dell, founder and managing partner of Black Brick Property Solutions, says: “Not all apartments are equal. We are seeing an upturn in demand for apartments, but buyers are far more discerning than before the pandemic. Outside space and proximity to a good local high street are top of buyers wish lists. We are seeing a very tough market for sellers of ex-rental stock located in older new builds, some with cladding issues and which are poorly located and without outside space. There is no market for them, no matter how cheap they become.”
Dell continues “Unfortunately, not all apartments will make the London-wide comeback a lot of sellers are hoping for. Buy to let has lost its attraction for many private Landlords, meaning ex-rentals are flooding the market with an added surge in apartment listings; supply is at an all-time high, while demand is selective and lacking.
“So unfortunately, unless apartment listings are located near green space, and a great high street they are likely to be difficult to shift.”
In other sectors of the prime London niche, the outlook is much brighter.
Dell says proximity to public space remains high on the ‘must have’ list for buyers.
She says: “With the majority of buyers on the lookout for properties with the same criteria, is it becoming the norm to engage in bidding wars, leading to paying over the asking price.
“To combat this issue, an increasing number of properties are being sold off-market. Our role as a buying agent has therefore become key, ensuring prospective buyers can navigate the complicated property market. 2021 saw a record percentage of ‘off-market’ sales for our clients.”
The agency says that notwithstanding the frenzied buying climate in 2021, Black Brick secured an average 3.6 per cent off asking price, a figure which it says it hopes to exceed in 2022.
Dell believes prime central London will see an influx of interest, with buyers gravitating back towards the city, as the race for space loses momentum.
And she says there is one area of London at the forefront of buyers’ minds – Bayswater.
“It is a unique part of London offering inner-city living, with competitive pricing and proximity to green space, reassuring buyers that they can enjoy the outdoors, when some apartments do not have their own outside space.”
And she concludes: “Bayswater is the one to watch. Having previously been considered a less desirable area, compared to its more swanky neighbours, it is becoming increasingly desirable. Buyers are comfortable returning to apartment living, as Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens offer the reassurance of nearby public outside space for those buying a property without a private garden, patio or balcony. Although restrictions have eased, it is likely the pandemic will have a lasting effect on buyers, leading them to permanently consider outside space in their criteria when purchasing in London.”
More than a third of home sales were subject to a bidding war last year, as a record number of buyers paid more than the asking price.
The share of homes sold in this way – defined as having three or more offers – hit 37pc in 2021, the highest figure since estate agency Hamptons began collating the data in 2010.
The vast imbalance between supply and demand pushed the proportion of properties selling for above the asking price to a record high. The share of sellers who achieved above the asking price in England and Wales exceeded 31pc last year. This was up from 19pc in 2020, 17pc in 2019 and 11pc a decade ago.
A dire shortage of properties for sale led to bidding wars breaking out, as desperate purchasers stretched themselves to buy bigger homes in leafier neighbourhoods. The lack of homes for sale that created the cut-throat market is predicted to continue this year.
The average estate agent branch has just 12 properties for sale, according to property website Rightmove. This has sped up the average time to sell: in December, buyers snapped up homes two weeks quicker than the same month in 2020.
This stark shortage of homes for sale, and the huge demand, has also pushed more buyers to sell “off market”, without publicly advertising.
More than 135,000 homeowners sold “off market” in 2021, a 60pc increase on the roughly 84,500 who sold in each of the previous two years.
The share of homes selling after three or more offers was highest in Scotland, where the nature of the property market means sales often include a closing date by which all interested parties must have submitted an offer.
Harry Maitland, of agency Savills, said: “Last year was a remarkable year. I can count on one hand those properties that didn’t have multiple offers or achieve their asking price.”
He said coastal areas and key commuter villages had proved the most competitive, especially among families, buyers moving from outside of Scotland, or those looking for a holiday home.
The share of homes subject to bidding wars never fell below 30pc last year.
He added: “Special properties in a good location can sell for more than 50pc over the asking price.
“There was one renovated bungalow with a sea view overlooking the beach near Elie [in Fife] which was on the market for around £425,000. It had 70 viewings in 10 days and had 22 offers – I have never seen that before. It sold for more than 50pc over its valuation.”
The finite nature of the stamp duty holiday, which ran from July 2020 to September 2021, cranked up pressure on buyers, pushing them into bidding wars.
But the share of homes selling above the asking price was still at a record high towards the end of the year, after the holiday had ended.
In March 2021, the month the tax break was initially intended to end, 26pc of homes sold for more than they were originally listed. By October this had increased to almost 38pc and was still at 35pc in December.
Ms Whitfield added: “A few of our properties in the Cotswolds sold for millions in excess of the guide price. Buyers are really having to sell themselves to get ahead in the race, some have been writing letters to sellers, trying to humanise their bid.
“In some sales the vendor’s cars have even been negotiated into the sales, because buyers are moving out of London and buying a property with land for which they need a four-wheel drive.”
Despite a well-documented exodus from London last year, bidding wars were also prevalent in the more high-end areas of the capital, said Tom Kain, of Black Brick, a buying agent.
Would you pay thousands to a buying agent to find your dream home? Here’s how it works.
The supply crisis is hitting homes hard. It’s not just a lack of building materials, labour shortages and difficulty sourcing trendy taps and tiles, it is about finding a house in the first place. Such has been the pent-up demand to move house or invest in a second home during the pandemic — encouraged by the stamp duty holiday — that the number of bidding wars is at a record high, pushing the proportion of homes selling for above asking price to a record high.
There is no sign of the heat in the housing market, especially in the most popular postcodes, waning in 2022. The equity analyst Kevin Cammack of Cenkos Securities said last week: “Normal house price economics are out of the windowuntil the supply side improves.”
There were 31 per cent fewer homes available to buy across Britain in December 2021 than in December 2019, and prospective buyer numbers were up by 66 per cent over the same period, according to research from Hamptons estate agency. Estate agents have an average of only 12 homes for sale on their books, a record low, according to the property website Rightmove, and an average of 29 buyers for every property (said the letting agent body Propertymark). So how on earth do you find a house?
The answer is off-market — properties that change hands before they reach the portals. Off-market used to be the domain of the 1 per cent, but in London a fifth of homes were sold that way last year, 9 per cent in Britain, according to Hamptons. To find one you often need the help of a buying agent. There are an estimated 1,500 such agents in the UK. They all have different styles and fees, and are all competing like mad to find houses to show their clients.
The buying agent Henry Pryor claims to “have a rapport with estate agents that other buyers will struggle to compete with and access to properties nobody else does. In today’s market you have to be ready to fight and scratch someone’s eyes out.” For this he charges a £2,400 retainer or 25 per cent of the saving on asking price he secures for clients, or a flat fee of £12,000 up front. He bought £100 million of property last year. He does leaflet drops, uses Facebook and scours parish magazines to track down the perfect home to match a client’s requirements.
Most recently he completed on a house in Fulham, west London, for a hedge-funder and his wife. “We stole it off another buyer who thought they had it for £1.82 million. We nipped in and got it for £1.85 million,” he says. “The people we stole it from rang up and said, ‘We should employ you; we can’t afford to be cross; can you find us another house?’ We just bought them a home.”
Camilla Dell, who runs the buying agency Black Brick in prime central London, has a targeted letter-drop system with in-house mapping technology. As well as a £3,000 retainer, she charges 2.5 per cent of the purchase price or 20 per cent of saving from asking price. “For a client in Dulwich we targeted 20 roads, sent 50 letters, got six responses; my client bought one of those houses,” Dell says.
Garrington Property Finders, founded by Phil Spencer, the presenter of the TV show Location, Location, Location, is the largest independent buying agency in the UK, covering southwest England to Scotland and charging £2,000 plus VAT (expires after nine months) plus 2.5 per cent of purchase price (or bespoke).
“We recently acquired a £2 million coastal property in the South West that hadn’t changed hands for 25 years,” says its chief executive, Jonathan Hopper. “We saw a photographer post some shots on Instagram that he had taken for a local estate agent. We approached the agent before it went to market. They had 37 viewing requests; we were first in the door, made an offer, exchanged in seven days and the vendor cancelled the other viewings because we had a good reputation with the agent. Agents come to us early doors. They know we have serious buyers.”
Most buying agents require a minimum spend of £500,000 to £1 million; you’ll need to spend £2.5 million if you want to be on the books of Jess Simpson. She charges up front a £2,500 retainer plus VAT (valid 12 months), plus 2.5 per cent of purchase price, to find you a place in the home counties, Cotswolds, Wiltshire, Dorset or Somerset. Her USP? “I’m a chartered surveyor. I can value properties from a technical perspective,” she says. “I source properties through a network of solicitors, accountants, farming and riding communities. We keep our ear to the ground at the school gates; we get a lot of info there about who is thinking of moving. We know the local communities and issues. We know if there are plans to build 300 houses outside the village or if that lane is a rat run. Because of the shortage of houses on the market, right now we are offering sellers 12-month completions to give them time to find somewhere else to buy.”
However, in a move to “disrupt” this rather rarefied marketplace, Henry Sherwood, who founded the Buying Agents — whose patch covers central London, Surrey, Berkshire, Oxford and Bristol — has no minimum entry requirement, but will charge a minimum fee of £10,000, or a £500 retaining fee plus VAT (valid for six months), plus 1.5 per cent of purchase price. Prospective buyers benefit from a database of 18,000 contacts, including previous clients, private banks, wealth managers and family offices.
“We approach concierges in buildings and speak with them and find out which agents have gone in to do valuations,” Sherwood says. “There are no bargains in this market. If you are looking for discounted property we are not the firm for you.”
He cites a recent deal in which an American hedge-funder who owned a castle in Cambridgeshire wanted to buy the gatehouse. “But the gatehouse owner refused to sell to him — they had fallen out. So I got a friend of mine to pose as a buyer. He bought it for about £800,000 and on the same day sold it to the American hedge-fund guy. It’s called a simultaneous purchase. It’s perfectly legal.”
Mark Parkinson, a co-founder of Middleton Advisors, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of houses in southern England is second to none, charges a £2,750 retainer plus VAT (no expiry date), plus 2.75 per cent of purchase price. He will draw up a shopping list for each client, then approach the owners to “try to unlock those doors”.
Parkinson says: “It’s amazing how many people will sell if it’s discreet and they don’t have to open up their house to viewings on a Saturday. We don’t put letters in boxes, as they go straight in the bin. Agents know if they ring up the owners for us, there is a 90 per cent chance that our clients will buy it.”
It was how one of Parkinson’s clients recently acquired a £3 million country house with no agents or other buyers involved. “Nobody else saw it. Nobody else had an inkling it was for sale,” Parkinson says. “Had it been in Country Life there would have been a bidding war. Some sellers are not after every last pound and shilling. There is huge value in doing something privately and discreetly.”
‘2021 was a year when more and more people realised they needed some professional help to secure the house of their dreams’, says Black Brick.
PCL agency Black Brick has reported a “vintage year” as more buyers sought out professional help to navigate the market.
The Mayfair-based firm bought 25 properties on behalf of clients over the last 12 months, with a combined value of nearly £100m and an average saving of 3.6% off the asking price.
That compares to 2020’s tally of 13 deals for a total of just under £60m, with an average discount of 7.1%. Prices ranged from £700k – spent by a young musician in Hackney – up to £30m, which was offered for a “full-scale” country estate.
“In recent history it is certainly one of the best years we have ever had,” said Caspar Harvard-Walls (below), a partner in the firm.
Over four in ten of the deals were done off-market, compared to just under one in five during 2020.
“The majority of people have been buying houses, and the availability – in areas like St John’s Wood, Barnes, and Dulwich – has not been great,” said managing partner Camilla Dell: “We are making discreet approaches, because there is so little stock actually on sale.”
A third of this year’s clients were British, while the rest hailed from the USA, Europe, and as far afield as Hong Kong, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Maldives.
The overwhelming majority were owner-occupiers, but that could all change in 2022, added Dell: “We are just starting to see investment interest coming through, from people who think that the prices are right and interest rates are very low. I suspect that this time next year the split between owner occupiers and investors will look very different.”
Renting a high-end property in central London has always required potential tenants to present the best possible credentials to exacting landlords. But, as the UK capital has reawakened to commerce and travel, this ultra-exclusive beauty contest has become even more intense. Richard Davies, head of lettings at estate agent Chestertons, gives the example of wealthy tenants who want to bring their pets into a pristine luxury property — often a tricky sell to landlords. “Pet owners have had to up their game in an already tight market,” he says, “by supplying very detailed information about their pets, usually in a pet résumé that includes information about their grooming regime, behavioural analysis and even details of the pet’s therapists.”
Tenants eyeing super-prime homes in London — defined as those costing £5,000 or more a week to rent — face a combination of ferocious demand and dwindling supply. After a year in which international travel virtually ground to a halt and tenants with deep pockets shunned the apartments that predominate in the “golden postcodes” of prime central London, a rapid recovery in this niche of the market is under way.
Expatriates have begun returning for corporate stints in the city, along with the wealthy families that divide their time between London and other favoured destinations. The resumption of office life is picking up pace, while theatres, galleries and restaurants have reopened their doors. The UK capital is once again asserting its gravitational pull. That means prospective tenants can no longer take their time if they wish to secure a place they want.
A four-bedroom flat in Holland Park available to rent for £10,000 a week
Davies says tenants last year had the luxury of being able to choose from around half a dozen properties. “Now they’re lucky if there’s one or two,” he says. “They need to make a decision if they want to get it. The situation has reversed very quickly — I’d say over the last four months.” According to Chestertons’ data, the stock of prime rental homes available in mid-October was 73 per cent down on the first month of lockdown in 2020.
Popular areas for super-prime rental properties are similar to those in the sales market: Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea and Mayfair are high on the list for most tenants, though leafier St John’s Wood and Hampstead have risen in popularity over the pandemic.
One recently marketed by Chestertons was a five-bedroom terraced house in the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park in central London, with views over the park, a cocktail bar, gym, sauna and a separate mews house for staff or guests. The rent was £25,000 a week. Another, a four-bedroom property in Westminster at £14,000 a week, overlooks St James’s Park and has a private garden — an extra attraction in the wake of pandemic lockdowns.
Rents in this sector of the market, already high, are climbing even higher. According to estate agent Savills, rents for prime property rose 6.4 per cent in Westminster over the third quarter of 2021, 6.2 per cent in Belgravia and 5.7 per cent in Chelsea. That compares with annual declines in 2020 of 7.9 per cent in Belgravia, 6.5 per cent in Chelsea and 7.5 per cent in Knightsbridge, and smaller pre-pandemic declines of between 0.2 and 2.9 per cent in 2019.
If demand is soaring, what is preventing supply from responding to meet it? Estate agents point to a confluence of factors. Some owner-landlords were tempted by a surge in buying and selling activity over the past 18 months and decided to sell up, taking their stock out of the rental market. As London has opened up to travellers, the market for holiday rentals on platforms such as Airbnb is recovering, further reducing the supply of property for traditional short lets. And a seasonal spike has just passed, when wealthy overseas students snap up rental properties in London ahead of the start of term.
Tenants also won significant concessions from landlords last year as the market for short lets froze up in the pandemic. Some secured exceptionally good deals at relatively low rents and made the most of it by signing tenancies of three or four years — homes that will not return to the market for some time to come.
Estate agents cite another less obvious factor: flooding in London over the summer had little long-lasting impact on the mainstream market but fuelled demand for top-notch properties by displacing some owner-occupier families from their homes for months, as they called in builders to reinstate inundated basements.
Those in the mainstream market might legitimately ask why super-prime renters would not use their ample resources to purchase a home in London, securing a valuable asset and benefiting from any capital appreciation. Tom Smith, head of super-prime lettings at estate agent Knight Frank, says renting has become a much more popular lifestyle choice for wealthy clients who seek flexibility and freedom from red tape. The muted or even declining performance of London house prices in this segment in recent years has not persuaded them otherwise.
Stamp duty, too, is now a significant factor for the well-heeled when weighing renting against buying, with steady increases in the purchase charge for high-value properties. On a £10m property intended as an additional home, the £1.4m stamp duty bill alone could fund four years of super-prime renting in central London.
Those wrestling with these issues today are less likely to be corporate tenants, a market that agents say has lost share over the past decade or so to private wealth. “Eighty per cent of the time, it’s a contract with an individual, not a company,” says Smith.
Until the summer, agents say the main interest in rentals had come from the domestic market, though that does not imply UK citizens alone. Non-domiciled people, often with family members in the capital or existing ties to London, have been active in the super-prime market. But, from August, says Smith, discretionary international tenants returned as travel rules eased. “That’s happened quite quickly. Supply is really strained,” he adds.
The influx of wealthy renters varies by region. Europeans are returning to London faster than those from other regions, while Chinese tenants at the super-prime level are thinner on the ground. Turkish and Indian renters have also reappeared, often ahead of the start of the autumn term at British private schools.
One knock-on effect of this, says Smith, is a rejuvenated market for luxury apartments of a type that went rapidly out of fashion in the pandemic. Then, people sought outside space even in the densely developed areas of central London. “In the first half, rental demand was very house-heavy — 85 per cent at one point,” says Smith. “But now, between July and September, that’s swung back and it’s 45 per cent apartments.”
Landlords range from families who have left the UK for a spell overseas and want to draw an income from their property, to developers and investors who have failed to sell and prefer to let while waiting for an upturn in the market. “At that end of the market, it will often be a developer who hasn’t managed to get a price that’s acceptable to them or their investors,” says Camilla Dell, founder of buying agent Black Brick, who also acts for prospective tenants.
By contrast, many private owners are reluctant to let their properties because of the hassle, estate agents say. But securing mortgage financing for a super-prime rental property is seldom part of the problem for well-resourced owners. And, given that mortgage interest rates are at or near record lows, owners have an incentive to overcome the problems involved in becoming a landlord.
Nigel Bedford, associate director at mortgage broker largemortgageloans.com, says he recently set up a remortgage on a central London property worth about £20m for a Middle Eastern owner who had failed to sell at a price they wanted. Instead, they decided to let it. As is typical with ultra-wealthy owners, the mortgage came from a private bank, which charged 1.75 per cent above base rate for five years on the interest-only loan of £12m. “They can get money at sub 2 per cent, so it is not going to cost them to keep the property. The rental income will easily cover Ated [an annual tax charge] and running costs,” he says.
In a red-hot market, how does a prospective tenant improve their chances of securing the home they want at a price they like? Speed is key, says Izzy Birch Reynardson, head of super-prime lettings at Savills. “We’re seeing a lot of people who are not quick enough. I have two tenants seeking homes to rent who have lost three properties each.”
She describes a market in which, given the sums involved, the pool of landlords and potential tenants is small. This means a prospective tenant’s “profile” is a big factor in securing a deal. Wealthy families or those who work at the top echelons of financial services move in similar circles. “They all know each other,” says Birch Reynardson. “And if they don’t, they can always pick up the phone and very quickly find out what they need to know.”
That includes not only whether tenants are reliable payers but, for example, how they treat a property and how they interact with neighbours. Tenants with a record of bad behaviour will struggle. “It’s all very well if I get a massive price for my client but, if we get someone who’s throwing late-night parties, they’re known in the network,” says Birch Reynardson. “We know how people run their households.”
A poorly supplied market leaves much less room for negotiation. Many prospective tenants are finding themselves asked to submit sealed bids, fuelling price rises. But Dell of Black Brick suggests one eye-opening tactic that worked for two people she dealt with recently: “You can offer to pay the rent for a year up front. That makes you attractive as a tenant.” Such an approach is not so unusual at super-prime level, particularly for newly arrived expats without 12 months of payslips to show landlords, or young adults who could never afford the rent on their own but can rely on wealthy parents to write the cheque.
The imbalance of supply and demand has also given a big boost to off-market lettings, where agents do not advertise a property for rent but offer it to prospective tenants who have committed to a budget and are keen to move, says Smith of Knight Frank. “There are some very focused people out there and you can take it directly to them.”
In a sign of the times, he says he has even had tenant-clients recently who have signed pre-letting agreements on development properties where building work was not yet complete. “I had one client with a very healthy budget who had been looking for nine months. It was apparent that you could chuck a lot of money at the problem and it still wasn’t going to fix it. So, when he saw something that wasn’t finished, he was ready to commit.”
Kristin Young has just moved from Seattle to London for her job in tech. The 26-year-old American and her partner, Will, will be renting a one-bedroom apartment at The Marlo, a new purpose-built rentals scheme in Marylebone, a wealthy part of central London to the south of Regent’s Park and north of Mayfair.
“Not knowing London, we looked into places popular with other expats such as Chelsea and South Kensington, but Marylebone was the right fit for us,” she says. “With its great restaurants and cute, independent shops, it feels more like a neighbourhood.”
Marylebone may be highly prized for its high-end “village” feel, but the lockdowns of the pandemic have been extremely tough for the businesses along Marylebone Lane and Marylebone High Street that have become the area’s “shopfront”, says Julian Best, executive property director of the Howard de Walden Estate, the landowner: “We reduced retail and residential rents to support tenants.”
Private landlords were forced to slash asking prices: last autumn, some flats and houses in the area were being advertised with 25 per cent discounts in a bid to appeal to tenants.
A year on, an increasing number of people are returning to the office, along with wealthy international students and renters such as Young. Rental prices are being pushed up again.
From January to September this year, the number of new lets in Marylebone was up 11 per cent on the same period of 2019, with the number of properties on the market to let down by 36 per cent — slightly more than the 31 per cent across prime London, according to LonRes, which tracks the sector.
Rates are not yet at the level that they were pre-pandemic. The average price per sq ft per year being paid on a flat (flats currently account for 94 per cent of the market in Marylebone) is £46, still 10 per cent below the £51 recorded in the third quarter of 2019.
Almost anything between £700 and £1,000 a week — the average rental price of a two-bedroom flat in Marylebone — is getting snapped up, says David Ornsby, head of lettings at Carter Jonas. “One in a period building off Marylebone High Street went on the market at 11am on a Friday this month at £775 per week and by 3pm we had 11 offers. It went for £950 a week to two Kuwaiti students at UCL who paid 12 months’ [rent] upfront,” he says. At The Marlo, one-bedroom flats with a shared garden start at £785 a week.
At the end of August, the lowest two floors of a six-storey Georgian terraced townhouse — a 3,570 sq ft four-bedroom duplex — received six offers. The luxury property, which had an initial asking price of £5,000 a week, eventually went to Mark Shipman, who beat American and French bidders after selling his five-storey family home in St John’s Wood.
“I’ve always liked the idea of having everything on my doorstep,” he says. “We’ve been to the theatre half a dozen times, I hop on the Brompton bike to work — the car hasn’t been used for a month.” His three daughters attend the local independent day school Queen’s College. The family are now looking to buy a property nearby.
Francesca Fox, lettings manager at agent Beauchamp Estates, says the Shipmans are not the only ones “trying before they buy”. But there has been less activity in the sales market this year than the rentals market. The average price of flats sold in Marylebone this year has been £1.45m, down from £1.5m in 2019; the average price of a house has been £3.6m, down from £3.84m in 2019. While they make up only a small proportion of properties in the area, houses are taking an average of 237 days to sell, if they sell.
“You’ve got to really love Marylebone to buy a house there,” says Camilla Dell of Black Brick, a buying agency. “If you want a garden and off-street parking, Holland Park, Notting Hill and St John’s Wood are better bets.” Houses can take years to sell; five sold in the past 18 months through agent Knight Frank. “It’s been a largely domestic market but the area’s new-build schemes are selling, albeit slower than before [the pandemic],” says Christian Lock-Necrews of the agency. These schemes include Harcourt House in Cavendish Square, Regent’s Crescent and The Park Crescent. Opening its show apartment last week was The Bryanston, on the north-east corner of Hyde Park — its 54 apartments are priced from £2.4m.
While prices in Marylebone are high, they are still typically 20 per cent less than next-door Mayfair, says Dell, although the gap is narrowing for the area’s super-prime, new-build apartments. “New-build in Marylebone now trades at well over £3,000 a square foot,” she says. This includes Marylebone Square, with its 54 apartments on Marylebone Lane due to complete in 2023, from £2.55m. So far, 22 of them are sold, the developer says.
The price of flats has been falling recently, however. Per square foot, the average price of a flat sold this year has fallen 15 per cent year-on-year, to £1,380, according to LonRes — good news for tenants testing the water with a view to buying in Marylebone.
Buying guide
Marylebone is between Baker Street (Jubilee/Bakerloo line) and Bond Street (Jubilee and Elizabeth Line) Underground stations, with its mainline station the southern terminus of the Chiltern line towards Oxfordshire. By May 2023 (the full opening of Crossrail), Bond Street to Heathrow airport will take 34 minutes.
The average discount off initial asking price on rentals was 4.1 per cent in Q3 2021, down from 14 per cent in Q3 2020, according to LonRes.
New businesses in Marylebone include an Ottolenghi deli and space for fashion brands RIXO, Fursac, Wyse and Mejuri; Australian eatery Granger & Co and Italian deli Lina Stores are on their way.
Even those with healthy budgets of between £4m and £10m are coming unstuck in hotspots like St John’s Wood & Putney, according to Black Brick
A buying agency has claimed that finding a decent house in one of the capital’s hottest markets is now “impossible” without professional help.
A number of firms have flagged up how stiff the competition has become for properties (specifically houses, rather than flats) in areas like St John’s Wood lately. Competitive bidding and record prices continue to be fuelled by a shortage of stock and strong demand for large family homes in the leafiest enclaves.
Camilla Dell, managing partner of Mayfair-based Black Brick has gone further, declaring: “I would go as far as to say that it is impossible to buy in one of these very busy markets without a buying agent.”
House prices in NW8 have risen by over 10% in the past 12 months alone, according to Dell, who notes that even unmod examples on good streets have breached the £3,000 per sq ft mark – and are currently changing hands for £3,200 to £3,300 per sq ft.
“A lot of the clients we are taking on at the moment are people looking in the £4m to £10m bracket and they just can’t find anything to buy or they find something and then get gazumped,” she added.
SW15 is another hotspot, said partner Caspar Harvard-Walls: “We showed a house in Putney to a client on a Friday, the day it went onto the market…They didn’t want it, but within two days the vendor had an asking price offer and one of over asking price. It was gone in two days.”
The firm doesn’t see the imbalance between supply and demand resolving any time soon and advises those looking in one of these sought-after areas to “prepare themselves for a real bun fight”.
This super-prime family house in St John’s Wood was acquired for a Black Brick client recently, following six months of ‘persistence and patience’.
Other buying agencies have reported a “wave of demand” for their services over the last two years, with many unable to meet the level of enquiries coming in. Jonathan Hopper of Garringtons, one of the largest operators, said the pandemic had “transformed the way buying agents are seen” while Jonathan Harington of long-established firm Haringtons said representation had “become the norm for savvy buyers”.
Is a dose of reality returning to the UK property market, with London once again the traditional driving force of national house price growth?
“It’s clear demand for London property is back to pre-pandemic levels; however, the underlying story isn’t quite that simple,” says Stephen Moroukian, Product and Proposition Director at Barclays Private Bank.
Rewind to the start of the pandemic and months of cooped-up indoor living and the great work-from-home experiment initially drove an urban exodus, as the idea of leaving London and other cities for a new life in the country appealed to many. Buyers became engaged in a race for space – with a desire for bigger homes to live and work in, as well as gardens and easy access to the coast and countryside.
Yet today, things feel different. Commuters are pouring back into London, and the UK finally seems open for business once more.
“While there’s been talk of a London exodus, people now need to spend more time in the office again – and the commute is a greater factor within their property thinking,” says Lucian Cook, Head of Residential Research at Savills.
A shortage of available UK housing stock has also made buyers refocus on the London market.
Areas with bigger houses and gardens close to central London have recently done particularly well, according to Cook – such as “the ‘wealth corridors’ that run north through Islington and St John’s Wood towards Highgate; the strong southwest corridor from Fulham and Clapham to Wimbledon; and the emerging corridor from Ealing to Chiswick have all done particularly well recently”.
Savills is reporting that properties with five or more bedrooms in prime southwest and west London are now 7.3% higher than they were in the third quarter of 2020, compared to just 2.4% across the capital as a whole1.
Reversal of pandemic trends
Figures from Knight Frank reveal the number of buyers moving from urban to rural peaked in January 2021 and has been declining since2.
Another pandemic trend was a shift away from apartment-based city living. Flats lost not only their popularity, but also their value in many towns and cities across the country, according to research by the Office for National Statistics3 – with flats failing to keep pace with price rises for detached and semi-detached homes in the period from January 2020.
House price growth suffered in London, too, during the first year of the pandemic, according to the ONS data3. London property prices increased just 5.1%, compared to 9.6% for villages, 9% for towns and 7.8% for cities – reversing the trend of the last decade where London recorded the highest average annual growth.
“London has enjoyed incredible property price growth over the last 30 years and there haven’t been many events like the pandemic where the rest of the UK has increased more in value – nevertheless 5% growth in London is still a reasonable return on an investment,” says Moroukian at Barclays Private Bank.
The resilience of the UK capital is there for all to see – London’s average property price in 1991 was around £75,0004. Today, it’s £493,400, according to Zoopla5. That’s a more-than 500% increase in just three decades.
And as buyers return to the market, Knight Frank is predicting that the prime central London market will outperform all others in the UK by 2025, with cumulative growth of 25%6.
London could also be facing up to a shortage of new housing supply in prime areas; for the first three quarters of 2021 there were 352 transactions in the UK capital of £5 million-plus properties, compared to just 348 for the whole of 2020, according to Savills7.
“While there’s been a flight to quality, especially in the flats market, there’s no doubting that the prime central London markets are picking up,” says Tim Hyatt, Head of Residential at Knight Frank. “And with London back in full swing, there’s much more positivity about.”
London rents, too, took a tumble during the pandemic – falling as much as 10% at one point, according to Zoopla8. But again, rents are rising as tenants return to London.
“We’re seeing a big increase in rental searches, and also people buying flats,” says Camilla Dell, Founder of central London buying agency Black Brick. “It’s a complete reversal of the pandemic trend. Renters and buyers are craving well-located apartment living. They want central London again with a proximity to work, a good high street and public transport – rather than outside space.”
Overseas investors returning to UK property market
Foreign buyers are also gearing up to return to the market, although passenger numbers at Heathrow Airport were still only at 38% of pre-pandemic levels as of September 20219.
When they do return in bigger numbers, they will be looking for investments in prime real estate areas such as Chelsea, Kensington and Belgravia. Urban pieds-à-terre could see a resurgence, too, with owners embracing the country while keeping a foothold in London.
“As international buyers return, you’ll see additional demand flow back into the system,” says Cook at Savills. “London’s credentials as a safe-haven investment remain. The fundamentals underpinning demand for central London for the last 25 years are still there; it’s just international travel that’s been put on hold. London looks set for a burst of growth.”
New London commuter belt emerging
Although COVID-19 has reshaped the UK property market, it’s one of the few sectors to have shrugged off the pandemic. Sales have boomed across the country. The average UK property is today £235,000 – £17,500 more expensive than before March 2020, according to Zoopla10.
For those making the move out of London but still wanting easy access to the capital, many are settling in the prime regional urban markets of Oxford, Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Winchester and Cambridge. A new commuter belt is stretching far beyond the peripheries of London.
“For London leavers looking for a less dramatic lifestyle shift, and more accessible commute, there’s been a real resurgence in the last six months of these ‘uber-towns’ with their space and greenery, great accessibility and all the urban amenities,” says Cook at Savills.
Sales of £1 million-plus properties have also surged outside London11. While London is still home to a significant portion of the prime market, there’s now a broader geographical spread of sought-after, luxury properties.
London calling
Yet London is far from finished and, despite lockdowns, the things that made it such a sprawling metropolis never really went away.
So as London’s importance to Britain resumes and the future hybrid working model evolves, the return of a more “normal” property market beckons – with London again very much front and centre.
“The fundamentals for London have remained strong,” says Moroukian at Barclays Private Bank. “The UK capital has always been a property hotspot for global high-net-worth individuals.
“And with the return of international buyers, which could create a mismatch in supply and demand, this is all likely to continue to support future growth.”
Next spring Peter and Melanie Tunstall will finally be on their way to London to start a new life – and find a new home.
The couple, both originally from Connecticut, are planning to swap the frenetic, high rise, and increasingly politically-unstable Hong Kong for a leafy London urban village. And, if property pundits are correct, they will not be alone.
The relaxation of UK travel restrictions has opened the floodgates for overseas buyers to return to the British capital after a 16-month absence.
Experts believe that when they do the fading fortunes of Prime Central London will be decisively reversed.
Buying agent Camilla Dell, managing partner at Black Brick, has been advising high end clients on their property purchases since 2007.
During the height of the pandemic, she said, overseas buyers vanished. In September her phone started ringing again and her client roster now includes buyers from across North America, Africa and the Middle East keen to drop £2m to £5m on a PCL property.
“Overseas buyers are certainly back; you only have to walk through Mayfair or Knightsbridge or try and book a table at Scott’s to see how busy London is again,” agreed buying agent Jo Eccles, founder of Eccord, who is currently working with clients from the US, Israel, Germany, and Azerbaijan.
Peter and Melanie visited London in January 2020 to reconnoitre potential locations. After rejecting everywhere from Chelsea to Shoreditch (“I don’t have facial hair or a man bun, so I feared I would be discriminated against,” explains Peter), they settled on Marylebone, for its village feel and central location. Their budget, for a flat with outside space, is £5m to £6m.
“I have been in Hong Kong for 21 years, and I met my wife here,” explained Peter, 57, who works for a logistics company. “But we were never going to be here forever. Hong Kong is more a place to work and get out than a place to stay.”
The couple had hoped to move last year but the pandemic prevented them. “The problem is not getting into the UK, it is getting back into Hong Kong,” said Peter. “There is a three week quarantine period, in a government-specified hotel, and they are increasingly hard to book. We have realised that we are not going to be able to look at property until we are living in London full time.”
Fortunately, the couple have friends with a pied-a-terre in South Kensington they can borrow, and they plan to move next spring. Melanie, 40, will continue to run her fashion company remotely while Peter is planning to set up a company himself.
How do high-end international buyers affect London house prices?
The absence of buyers like Peter and Melanie have, collectively, had a massive impact on the property market PCL.
Pre-pandemic overseas buyers were responsible for around half of all property sales in neighbourhoods like Knightsbridge and Mayfair, according to estate agent Hamptons. This year that figure had dropped to just over a quarter.
Prices have not plunged – according to most house price indexes they have simply remained reasonably flat – although the number of sales has collapsed.
“That is because of the nature of property ownership in PCL,” said buying agent Andrew Weir, CEO of London Central Portfolio. “At times of soft prices people just don’t sell, because they don’t need to.”
Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, believes that as overseas buyers return prices will start to rise.
“As international travel is progressively reinstated, we expect to see more pronounced price growth in this market, which has been a long time coming,” he said. “While we expect prices to end the year around two per cent higher in 2021, we expect annual price growth to rise to eight per cent next year.”
How the high rollers house hunt
One measure of the presence of high rolling international visitors is activity at Farnborough Airport, one of the most luxurious private airports within easy reach of London, where the number of arrivals and departures last month was up 62 per cent compared to September 2020.
Emirates has reopened its lounge at Heathrow as travellers from the Middle East return, and London’s hotels are also busier than they have been since the onset of the pandemic.
And from private jets to five star hotel high rolling international buyers have a very different experience of house hunting to those lower down the property ladder.
Marc von Grundherr, a director of Benham & Reeves estate agents, said buyers coming in from Hong Kong favour the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge as a crash pad during buying trips, while Asian buyers like the JW Marriott Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. Middle Eastern clients tend to favour old school luxury hotels and can be found at the Dorchester, Claridge’s, or the Connaught.
Buyers who know London well are happy to whip out their Oyster card and go to viewings by train, while newbies might hire a driver.
And agents like von Grundherr might volunteer to chauffeur them around town themselves. “Some agents have a Rolls Royce to drive clients around in, but I think that gives totally the wrong impression,” he said. “We have a nine seater Mercedes.”
While looking around ultra-luxurious houses buyers must place shower-cap style plastic covers over their designer shoes to protect floors, and if children are to be present von Grundherr brings a colleague to help supervise the little darlings to prevent breakages of priceless pieces.
Non-Disclosure Agreements are a rarity, required only if a property has a very high profile owner, but taking pictures on your phone during a viewing is a massive no.
The top London areas for HNWIs
Buyers at this level also have a strict list of buying requirements, said Simon Barry, head of new developments at Harrods Estates.
“High net-worth individuals are always on the lookout for any property with a view of one of London’s parks and Hyde Park especially and will usually stick to the golden postcodes around Kensington, Knightsbridge or Mayfair – though many are happy to look at Bayswater and Marylebone where they will get more for the same budget,” he said.
Von Grundherr adds leafy London villages like St John’s Wood, Richmond, and Wimbledon to the list.
“Would I show them anything in East London? Absolutely not,” he said. “They would think I had gone mad. “They don’t know the location and there is an awful lot of keeping up with the Joneses, so they look at where other people have gone before them.”
Many international buyers want a London home for occasional visits.
Karen Goodin, a partner at Heaton & Partners, is finding increasing numbers of her buyers want a London crash in favour of staying in hotels when in town, perhaps because a private home provides a more Covid-secure environment.
“I have a Canadian with a £1.5m budget, and an American with a £4.5m budget, both looking to buy a Chelsea pied-a-terre as an alternative to staying in a hotel and with the added prospect of future capital growth,” she said.
Others are looking for student digs for their fortunate offspring. “One US client searching for a property in Mayfair is a couple looking for an apartment for their daughters, who will be attending boarding school in the UK,” said Eccles. “They were only willing to consider two of the most sought after streets in Mayfair.”
With these kinds of budgets and stories overseas buyers are, certainly from the standpoint of a Londoner struggling to get onto the ladder, easy to hate.
But in many ways what happens in PCL, boom or bust, doesn’t really matter in the real world. If average prices in Kensington & Chelsea, currently just over £1.3m according to the Land Registry, were to rise or fall ten per cent overnight they’d still be too expensive for all but the one per cent to consider.
“A very exotic, rarefied £6m flat in Knightsbridge being sold has a very negligible impact on the wider market in the greater scheme of things,” said Weir. “What you have got in PCL is a certain group of very wealthy people from a vast array of countries buying and selling properties to each other and it has been that way for a very long time.”
There are 317 homes over £10 million for sale — the race for super-prime real estate is revving up
London’s super-prime property market is roaring back to life. Overseas buyers are beginning to return and the supply of luxury bricks and mortar is set to be boosted by the launch of luxury developments with multimillion-pound price tags.
A silver Lamborghini with a blue camouflage wrap and a Kuwait registration plate comes gunning into the narrow Mayfair street and parks on a double yellow line next to where Peter Wetherell, the founder of the Mayfair-based estate agency Wetherell, stands. It is a potent symbol of the va-va-voom returning to the capital.
“We should be proud that so many people are flying themselves — and their cars — over just to ride our streets and view our properties,” Wetherell says.
Wealthy Middle Eastern visitors are not just driving their cars, but driving the market and snapping up properties, while Far Eastern purchasers — who for years have led the pack and paid the premium for a central London postcode — are still unable to get here because of travel restrictions.
“Typically, high-net-worth buyers from Hong Kong are the early movers, followed by those from the Middle East,” says Henry Faun, a partner and head of the Middle East project marketing team at the estate agency Knight Frank, who adds that “phones are ringing off the hook”.
With the UAE having come off the government’s red list in early August, Faun says that a year’s worth of pent-up demand is being released. “One of our clients arrived in London recently with £30 million ready to invest. Within two weeks they had made an offer and exchanged on a property.”
Data from Knight Frank shows that demand for London properties is returning to pre-pandemic levels. When it comes to nationalities, homebuyers from the UAE have increased 47 per cent between January and August, compared with the same period in 2019. The estate agency also says sales over the period were up 56 per cent compared with the whole of 2020.
Analysis by the estate agency Hamptons shows that Middle Eastern buyers were the only nationality to increase their share of properties purchased across London since 2019.
Andrew Wishart, a property economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, says: “The real estate sector makes up about 12 per cent of GDP, so overall the sector is very important. But while the price of homes in prime central London is high, the value of prime homes transacted — around £4 billion in 2019 — is just a fraction of the £285 billion in the national market.”
Nonetheless it is a market that fascinates not just those collecting the hefty fees from top-end sales, but also the general public, who see it as a bellwether for the desirability of the capital, if not the country. During the pandemic, while the rest of the country’s property market boomed central London was subdued as domestic buyers fled to the country while international investors stayed at home.
Now though, as travel restrictions ease and vaccination programmes are rolled out, multimillionaires with money to splash are being given plenty of choice thanks to the launch of luxury developments that were delayed by the pandemic. According to figures published by this week by the estate agency Beactive there are 317 properties for sale for £10 million or more in the capital, giving buyers ample opportunity to join a global elite: there are 63 billionaires living in London, the largest concentration in the world outside San Francisco and Hong Kong.
On Monday, the developer Almacantar unveiled its showroom apartment at the Bryanston, a 54-flat ultra-luxury scheme next to Marble Arch and overlooking Hyde Park. The developer will be hoping that state-of-the-art features such as air purification systems will help to lure wealthy buyers to the block, designed by the starchitect Rafael Viñoly, where prices start from £2.4 million. The spacious apartments look out towards One Hyde Park, the original development of choice for Middle Eastern buyers.
Also overlooking Hyde Park is Park Modern, a 57-flat luxury development by Fenton Whelan where prices start at £2.2 million. A spokesman for the developer says growing demand from the Middle East was the reason it launched a roadshow of the scheme in Dubai.
Amenities at both the Bryanston and Park Modern include the now standard concierge, restaurant, café and valet parking, plus wellbeing facilities — a 25m pool, gym, spa, cinema and treatment salon.
Further out in Kensington, Lancer Square — a 36-apartment, three-block multi-use development by the Malaysian developer Bellworth, designed by Squire and Partners — also launched last week with prices beginning at £4.86 million for a two-bedroom flat.
Meanwhile, Christian Candy, of One Hyde Park fame, has a new scheme too: 80 Holland Park, where prices for a two-bedroom flat start at £2.6 million. The 25-apartment development has a 24-hour concierge, underground car parking with electric charging points, a 16.8m pool and a gym.
Despite their high-end facilities, the new breed of luxury developments are more understated than their predecessors. Tastes have changed since the Candy brothers launched One Hyde Park ten years ago and the style now is more pared down and minimalist with white the primary shade, not black.
Nonetheless, Will Watson, the head of London at the buying agency the Buying Solution, says: “The super-luxe London crash pad is definitely having a moment.”
Period flats and houses in Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge are also selling fast. “We have the most enormous pipeline with over £50 million worth of properties under offer, anything from flats priced at £2 million up to £25 million,” says Camilla Dell, the founder of the buying agency Black Brick.
She says North American buyers are starting to come over too, a strong dollar making London properties more affordable. “The New York market is hotting up and some American buyers might think they’ve missed the boat there and decide to buy here instead,” she says.
An anonymous American entrepreneur bought a £6 million flat in Mayfair through Black Brick just before the pandemic. He says he was not daunted by the stamp duty tax because he was investing for the long term. “In the US, you pay property [wealth] tax every year,” he says. “I’m planning to use the flat for many years to come so I don’t mind paying tax in one go.”
Some Far Eastern investors are making a leap of faith and buying without viewing the properties in person. Agents say these buyers favour trophy assets that are in the £10 million-plus price bracket and new-build properties. One Chinese buyer is rumoured to have recently snapped up an entire block of flats with two ground-floor shops on Mount Street in Mayfair for £45 million.
Not everyone, however, is opting to buy. A growing number of high-net-worth individuals are in the market for luxury rentals and in many cases they are happy to pay several months’ rent in advance to secure the best properties, which in Mayfair would easily amount to many millions of pounds.
“What is often forgotten about Mayfair is that 91 per cent of the properties are flats and that over half of the homes in Mayfair are rented,” says Wetherell, who adds that his agency had twice the number of lettings in the third quarter of this year compared with the previous quarter, renting 26 properties over the past six weeks, most of which were for over the asking price.
Wetherell says renting, even at this level, is the cheaper option as an overseas purchaser buying a £10 million second home would pay £1.614 million in stamp duty. Renting is also more discreet. “If they buy, the information is out. It’s public. With renting no one knows,” he explains.
For years, the ultra-rich have used offshore companies to shield their identities, but through a number of leaks over the years — the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and now the Pandora Papers — the names and details of hundreds of heads of governments, businessmen and oligarchs have come out, shining a light on this world of elite transactions.
“[The] rich try to minimise taxes, just like you and I would do, there is nothing illegal in that,” says Gary Hersham, the founder of the prime estate agency Beauchamp Estate, who last year sold the most expensive home in Britain to a Hong Kong billionaire for £210 million. “If they are allowed to avoid paying stamp duty that’s a problem for the government, not for the rich.”
So why would rich people want to spend all that money buying or renting properties in London? “The answer to the question why,” Hersham says, “is always the same: because they can.”
London’s high-end property market is showing glimmers of recovery as a second consecutive quarter of price increases followed years of falling or flatlining values, according to new data.
Prices for expensive London homes rose by 1.4 per cent in the year to September, including a rise of 0.7 per cent in the latest three-month period, according to estate agent Savills. “The research is the latest evidence that the prime central London market has bottomed out and is growing for the first time since September 2014, despite the absence of international buyers,” said Savills, which defines prime as the top 5 to 10 per cent of homes by value in a given district. Compared with the surge in prices seen in the mainstream market in other parts of the UK, the rise is modest.
Nationwide on Thursday said annual growth in UK house prices was 10 per cent in September, down from 11 per cent the previous month. The market for prime property in the capital extends from prime central London — Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster — to top properties in more distant districts such as Chiswick, Wimbledon, Hackney, Clapham and Hampstead.
Average values in the Savills index for prime central London are £4.5m; or £2.5m across prime London as a whole. This market has been in the doldrums since the end of 2014, when changes to stamp duty land tax raised the cost of a purchase at the top end. Uncertainty over Brexit added to the sense of caution among wealthy buyers, leading prices in prime central London to fall by nearly 20 per cent between 2014 and 2018.
Last year, pandemic travel restrictions stifled demand from overseas buyers, while homeworking shifted the balance of demand to larger homes outside city centres in the “race for space”. But Savills said larger homes with gardens in London had increasingly benefited from the same effect, and this was accelerating as the return to office working gathered momentum.
In prime districts across the wider London area, homes with six or more bedrooms rose by an annual 6.2 per cent on average, with a 5.3 per cent rise for five bedroom homes. The effect was strongest in south-west areas of the capital favoured by families, such as Chiswick and Clapham, where price growth for the largest homes hit 8.9 per cent, comparable with rises elsewhere in the UK.
The gradual return to the office had started to change the priorities of buyers in the capital, said Lucian Cook, residential research director at Savills. “In our September buyer survey proximity to the Tube or train station took over from proximity to a park or green space at the top of buyers’ wish lists.” Tom Bill, head of UK residential research for estate agent Knight Frank, said prime central London had been in a “holding pattern” for the past six months, but change was afoot with the return of international buyers and “opportunistic purchasers”. Because the school year had now started, families will already have made their move, he said, leading to more purchasing by individuals over the next few months. “There’s an upwards momentum in London prime that’s long overdue. It’s straining at the leash to get going but we’re in a bit of an interim period at the moment,” Bill said.
Camilla Dell, founder of Mayfair-based buying agent Black Brick, said the prime central London property market was “finally showing signs of life”, particularly with the easing of travel restrictions. “It started in August when we suddenly had a lot of Middle Eastern clients coming over,” said Dell, adding that more clients arrived at the beginning of the school term, with prospective buyers coming mainly from North America, West Africa and the Middle East. Demand for apartments, which fell away during lockdown, may also be on the turn, with prices for prime central London flats growing by 0.6 per cent on the year in the Savills data — the first positive annual figure since 2014. Dell said that of eight clients she took on in the first two weeks of September, all but one wanted an apartment in prime central London. “There’s definitely more interest in apartments and the London pied-à-terre than there was 14 months ago,” said Bill. “That’s starting to change.”
Valuing the home on divorce can be a “bone of contention”, particularly for the woman in the relationship, specialists have warned.
Camilla Dell, founder and managing partner at buying agency Black Brick, said a lack of advice, distrust of valuations and having to be prepared for court battles are factors many divorcing women overlook, but all this can lead to additional stress and confusion.
Dell said: “We work with several divorce lawyers who often require our services for clients. When couples divorce the most valuable asset is often the family home. Who values the home can often be a bone of contention.
“If one side has an existing relationship with an estate agent there may be distrust from the other side that the valuation won’t be completely objective or unbiased.
“We have been asked by divorce lawyers to give our independent opinion on value in these situations.”
Historically, according to Debora Price, professor of gerontology at the University of Manchester, the man has taken his pension and the woman has taken the house on divorce.
Putting aside the problem of women not being able to fund their retirement years, Price said it is very hard for a woman to rely on the property as an “asset” later on in life.
We have been asked by divorce lawyers to give our independent opinion on value in these situations.
Dell commented: “There is a possibility that a woman might be able to release equity in the home, but outside of London and the south-east this is not a great option and comes with risks.
“The best way to release equity without any risks is to sell and trade down, but if you are living in a terraced house outside of London, it is not easy to trade down.”
There is also the importance of advising women to be prepared to explain why they need a certain value put on a home if the division of assets is contested and goes to court.
Often a woman might be left with a lower settlement because she does not know how to assess what sort of home she and any children might need – if the children are to live with her – as well as the ongoing cost of running a home.
Dell added: “We’ve also been asked by divorce lawyers to help prepare their client (often women) for court. We had one situation for a high-profile divorce where we had to prepare the wife.
“Part of that preparation included going on property tours to view houses of varying values, so when the judge asked her why she was seeking a certain value for her next home she could confidently talk about what things cost.
“That also included looking carefully at what the cost of running a home is too.”
Black Brick has signed up eight new clients in the last fortnight – all but one of whom are looking for apartments in London’s top postcodes: ‘It was tumbleweed for 18 months but now it is a frenzy’.
Prime Central London flats are back on the wishlist for high-end buyers, according to a Mayfair-based agency.
Black Brick’s buying team has reported signing up eight new clients in the last fortnight alone, with a combined spending power of £17m. Interestingly, 100% of them want PCL addresses, and all but one are after an apartment.
Homes sold in London this summer were 20% bigger than the 2016 to 2019 average, according to LonRes, but the renewed appetite for flats suggests this particular pandemic-driven market trend “could be slowing down”, said the firm.
“It has been an extraordinary start to autumn,” confirmed managing partner Camilla Dell. “Demand for Prime Central London flats is back. It was tumbleweed for 18 months but now it is a frenzy.
“It started in August when we suddenly had a lot of Middle Eastern clients coming over…Then, literally as soon as the schools went back we started to get really busy with lots of new clients.”
The new crop of prospective buyers have mostly come from North America, West Africa, and the Middle East.
The return of overseas buyers is good news for PCL developers and vendors, added the firm, but the heightened interest isn’t yet reflected in house price data. According to the latest official UK HPI, prices in Westminster are down 3% year on year (to an average £898k) while in Kensington and Chelsea they have inched up by 0.7% to just over £1.3m.
Dell: “If you walk around London it really feels like the buzz is back. People are back in their offices, and just walking around town it feels almost like the pandemic never happened. In terms of prices, the needle is probably already moving, and we could see growth in Prime Central London of 2 to 3% by the end of the year if it carries on at the current rate.”
For many African clients, owning real estate assets in the UK is about wealth diversification.
The UK property market bounced back exceptionally strongly from the depths of pandemic last year. This year March was the busiest month for property transactions in at least 15 years with total spend over the preceding year reaching its highest level ($280bn) since before the global financial crisis.
This is according to Tom Bill, head of UK residential research for Knight Frank, who says that as a result of all the recent activity in the sector, house prices are rising sharply. The Nationwide House Price Index shows house prices registered their biggest monthly gain since 2004 in April this year, taking annual house price growth of 10%.
“In simple terms, we are seeing price distortion due to a lack of supply. The first two months of the year were marked by uncertainty over new Covid-19 variants, which meant that new sellers were reluctant or unable to list their properties. When demand escalated sharply in March, supported by the stamp duty deadline, the best properties sold quickly and as those properties disappeared from the market, sellers hesitated, which exacerbated the supply shortage and placed upward pressure on prices.”
The relief on stamp duty (tax on the sale of the home, usually set at £125,000) was increased to £500,000 pounds by the British government in July 2020 with the aim of making it easier for those who may have been financially impacted by Covid-19 to purchase property and to ultimately boost a battered economy. The initial deadline of March 2021 has since been extended to September and applies to both residents and non-residents.
“However, one reason to believe the supply and demand imbalance will correct is that the number of market valuation appraisals is rising,” Bill says. “This is a good leading indicator for supply.”
He says there has been a return to annual price growth in prime central London (PCL) for the first time in five years. “This serves as a reminder that there has been a long overdue return to growth in PCL that was beginning to pick up before the pandemic struck.”
Camilla Dell, managing partner at Black Brick Property Solutions, says much of the “growth and madness in the property market has been taking place outside of PCL. When analysing property in certain parts of city centre, there is good value and interesting buying opportunities”.
She says that across PCL, property prices are down just over 20% since the peak of the market at the end of 2014. She echoes Bill’s sentiments that PCL is due some sort of price growth, which was starting to play out just after the general election and after the pandemic started.
She says there is a window of opportunity for buyers in PCL. This, however, comes with a caveat: that PCL has never been a high-yielding asset class.
Dell has helped a mix of clients from across Africa, purchase property in London, ranging from clients relocating after having sold their businesses through to clients choosing to educate their children either at boarding school or university, and investors, ranging from those buying single, buy-to-let properties all the way to larger clients investing in larger property blocks.
“For many African clients, owning real estate assets in the UK and in particular, Prime Central London is about wealth diversification. Many of the families we advise have made their wealth in much higher risk countries and continue to view property in London as a safe-haven asset class. There are other strong pull factors, including education and business.”
She says the point of investing in a London property is “long term capital growth and in that regard, the forecasts are looking positive with Knight Frank forecasting 25% growth over next five years”.
Sanah Gumede, head of Standard Bank Wealth & Investment SA, says: “The pandemic has brought about a shift in societal conduct and investor confidence. It has caused unrest and fears about economic stability, which is now almost impossible to anticipate. However, investors seeking core assets continue to flock to regions such as the UK, which capitalises on its reputation as a safe haven for foreign investors.”
As with any investment, it is important to gain a thorough understanding of the market dynamics and potential risks associated. Non-UK residents who are looking at acquiring property in this jurisdiction should consider additional costs associated with the purchase price. This includes the new 2% non-resident surcharge for Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT), which was introduced on April 1 and that foreign buyers must contend with.
“This is yet another blow to the London property market,” says James Quarmby, partner and head of private wealth at Stephenson Harwood LLP. “Much of the prime London property market relies on interest from foreigners and, with this latest increase, the top rate of SDLT now stands at 17%, almost reaching VAT levels. This is a disincentive to invest in UK residential real estate.”
Despite this higher cost, the London market presents opportunity for foreign buyers at present. The tax relief does relief can be used to maximise a potential investor’s budget in the market. Quarmby says: “The rate for commercial building remains sensible,” which is good news for business owners looking to set up operations in the country.
“At Standard Bank we aim to guide our clients through the maze of issues surrounding finding and securing a property acquisition,” says Adam Hunt, head of international wealth and investment at Standard Bank. “We work with companies such as Black Brick to help our clients locate and negotiate their required property. We then work alongside them to arrange finance for the acquisition and, with firms such as Stephenson Harwood, how to structure ownership suitable for their requirements.”
Those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into key trends shaping activity in the UK property market and a more comprehensive understanding of legal aspects to be cognisant of, can download the free to view webinar below, recently held by Standard Bank.
