The Sunday Times
How to deal with sealed bids
Offer too much and you’ll overpay; offer too little and you’ll miss out for ever. Here’s our top tips for handling this one-shot opportunity

Offer too much and you’ll overpay; offer too little and you’ll miss out for ever. Here’s our top tips for handling this one-shot opportunity
The windows need replacing and there’s a big crack in the drawing room ceiling, but this won’t deter the growing number of buyers seeking distinguished but dilapidated properties to make their own.
CAMILLA DELL is managing partner and founder of Black Brick Property Solutions. Having worked for two of London’s largest and most successful estate agencies, Foxtons and Knight Frank, Camilla set up Black Brick in January 2007.
Wealthy buyers in London are increasingly shunning luxury homes for cut-price dilapidated properties in the hopes of making a tidy profit.
Whether you are buying or selling, dealing with estate agents can be a trying experience — and, for sellers, an expensive one.
The property, a detached villa in Holland Park, went on the market at around £13 million. That valued the unmodernised property at around £2,500/square foot – a respectable price for a house in a desirable area, backing onto attractive communal gardens.
London’s garden squares are legendary.
No other city in the world has quite so many — and they never cease to astonish tourists, particularly Americans, who go all wobbly at the knees if they ever get to visit them.
Construction of luxury flats in central London dropped by a quarter last year, with apartments housed in developments dubbed “posh ghost towers” struggling to sell.
Estate agency Black Brick has launched a specialist service to cater for divorcing couples as an increasing number of the super-rich seek to untie the knot in London.
When the Norman Foster-designed HSBC building in Hong Kong was completed in December 1985, it was the most expensive building in the world ever to have been constructed.
Camilla Dell talks to Coutts Bank about the London property index.
Camilla Dell’s buying agency Black Brick is taking a team to Hong Kong after seeing “a surge in interest from Asians looking to invest in the central London property market”.