By Alexandra Goss.
Black Brick: Vendors Are Finally Accepting the New Reality on Prime London Prices
Price reductions are sweeping Britain’s property market, with discounts reaching a five-year high in prime central London — and Black Brick’s buying agents are well placed to capitalise on the opportunities this creates for clients, according to reporting in The Telegraph.
Tom Kain, buying agent at Black Brick, offered a blunt assessment of where the market now stands. “We have not paid full price for a property for a while,” he said. “After a long period of denial, vendors have finally accepted that their properties are no longer worth what they might have sold for at the height of the pandemic.”
The data supports this view. Average discounts across prime London reached 9.3% in the first quarter of 2025, according to Coutts, rising to 15% in Mayfair and St James’s. Of prime London homes valued between £1 million and £10 million that sold in the first three months of the year, 82% went for less than the asking price. Central London’s WC postcode recorded the highest proportion of properties reduced by at least 5% of any area nationally, according to Zoopla data analysed for The Telegraph.
The conditions reflect a significant imbalance between supply and demand. Rightmove reports that the number of homes for sale is the highest in a decade, while Knight Frank’s new sales instructions are running around a fifth above their five-year average — and new prospective buyers are running a fifth below it. Non-dom departures, a landlord sell-off driven by successive tax changes, and persistently high mortgage rates are all contributing to the glut of stock in prime postcodes.
For buyers with the right advice, however, the environment is creating genuine opportunities. Black Brick’s approach — rigorous pricing due diligence combined with skilled negotiation — is precisely suited to a market where asking prices and true values can diverge substantially, and where securing the right property at the right price requires both expertise and discipline.
Read the article here.