Wednesday, 30 April 2014

I assume that they look at the same charts as everybody else...

From The Evening Standard:

The historic owner of swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia today said it had sold off hundreds of millions of pounds worth of “super prime” property in London because of fears about the capital’s overheating market...

Grosvenor’s sell-offs included 11-15 Grosvenor Crescent, which it sold in December last year for £114 million to private developer Wainbridge. The company pumped sale proceeds into rental schemes in more affordable areas of London such as Bermondsey.


Here's a chart of Nationwide's average prices in London compared to the rest of the UK (excl. Outer Metropolitan), if they published the figures for Central London it would be far more extreme:
Assuming your aim is to collect as much rent as possible and you are indifferent to absolute house prices, it would have been a good strategy to simply sell up in London and buy 'everywhere else' at the peaks and then buy back into London in the troughs. Which is presumably what these ultimate rent seekers are doing.

5 comments:

Kj said...

But isn't Grosvenor first and foremost business property, and the cycle/ratio between london/outside slightly cless pronounced?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, no I think mainly residential, that is where the silly money is.

Bayard said...

"Which is presumably what these ultimate rent seekers are doing"

Which is fair enough: if you are going to be a landlord, you might as well be an efficient landlord. However, the piousness of their pronouncements on "investing in affordable housing" shows them to be hypocrites.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, no that bit is not hypocrisy, they meant that it is affordable to them.

Bayard said...

Ah, "affordable" in its original meaning, not its new meaning of "cheap and grotty (housing) on expensive land".