Saturday 11 June 2011

That works out at £9,391.44 per square yard.

From the FT:

The land originally formed part of a farm purchased in 1750 by the current owners, the Eyre Estate. The estate, a private family trust, has asked for offers of more than £225m, although Knight Frank, the agent handling the sale, expects the bidding to exceed £250m.

The barracks site has planning permission for 117 new homes that could have a total sale value of more than £1bn.

The 5.5 acre (2.2 hectare) site is located in exclusive St John’s Wood near Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. St John’s Wood is one of London’s so-called “golden postcodes”.


I'd like to ask the Faux Lib's and Homeys, exactly how much work and effort did this trust expend in order to increase the value of their farmland to ten thousand times as much as the value of ordinary UK farmland? Or did they just "punch the tree" and then wait patiently for three centuries while a capital city grew up around it?

10 comments:

chefdave said...

Ha ha "punch the tree", it's slowly making it's way into the modern Georgist lexicon!

Mark Wadsworth said...

CD, yup, I'll credit you with coining the phrase and me with using it to mean whatever I want it to mean in the context.

A K Haart said...

What's the tax situation on a sale like this?

Mark Wadsworth said...

AKH, how much tax is payable depends on who is selling it (UK or non-UK), what they are selling (the land, a company which owns the land) and to whom.

Could be anywhere between £nil and £lots, but the main tax is the having to hand over half the housing to be used as affordable housing.

dearieme said...

Much of the problem of British land/house prices could be sorted easily by moving the British capital to Berwick-on-Tweed.

chefdave said...

MW, thanks. But you know I can't take the credit as I stole it from somebody else that uses this blog!

It's yet another great example as to why home-ownerist "libertarianism" is desperately at odds with economic reality. I liken it to watching some poor guy working all week and then stepping in to collect his wages, clearly the FL's would be up in arms if this happened on a personal level, but when houseprices are at stake suddenly it becomes ok.

I've been stepping into the lion's den over at James Delingpole's blog to try and get the message across, but so far I've been written off as "blood and boil socialist", lol.

James Higham said...

Surely that's in the more money than sense category, for taxable purposes.

Anonymous said...

MW, thanks. But you know I can't take the credit as I stole it from somebody else that uses this blog!

Who was that? I know I've had the thought before, but don't remember actually saying it out loud. I do like it as a metaphor. It's a ridiculous yet perfectly logical extension of dogmatic Lockeanism.

Mark Wadsworth said...

F, you can't search comments in Blogger, but I can search them in my gmail and it appears that you coined this splendid expression back in March.

Anonymous said...

Oh, so I did! :) Happy to claim credit for that one!