Super-prime London, £70m Eaton Square, Belgravia: London's chronic housing shortage

Do you have £70 million spare to buy a central London home?

  A seven-bedroom, six-storey Eaton Square house in Belgravia with a gold-lined swimming pool – at £6,500 a square foot – is now London’s most expensive home.

   That’s even more expensive than the Candy brothers One Hyde Park apartments…(still known to the milkman as ‘100 Knightsbridge’).

   The Government can expect up to £5m Stamp Duty if the Eaton Square home’s asking price is met. The ‘super-prime’ property has shot up in value since last sold for £33m in 2009 and for a mere £9.5m in 2005.

Two-tier market

But you don’t need to look at ‘super-prime’ to see how central London and south-east London properties are creating a two-tier housing market. A relatively small family home in Putney could buy a whole street in Sunderland. A £5m home in a rich enclave like St George’s Hill in Weybridge – a London ‘satellite town’ in Surrey – could buy a street of homes in Glasgow’s Ibrox district.

    The combined property values of London boroughs – Barnet, Bromley, Camden, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Lambeth, Richmond upon Thames, Wandsworth, and Westminster – is estimated at £552 billion, equal to the total property values of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

    The London and south-east England property market is worth an estimated £2 trillion – 40% of the UK market by value. Such stats stun folk on average and lower incomes but excite estate agents.

Chronic shortage

But beneath the gloss festers London’s chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes. The conjured stats beg the question: who will be able to afford to live in 21st Century central London?

The Eaton Square home (above) is on the market with Knight Frank; Knightsbridge office, of course!

Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, February 2013