Property millionaire or thin air?
Price tag: £40 million, nine bedrooms, The Bishops Avenue, London
Years of booming house prices resulted in the creation of many ‘property paper millionaires’ who experienced rocket propelled property values and membership to the exclusive ‘property millionaires club’.
However this club has just shed a load of members…99,538 to be precise, leaving only 183, 630 today. That’s a 35% drop since November 2007 or another way of looking at it is 1 in 97 properties was valued at over £1 million two years ago but today that figure stands at just 1 in 150.
The hardest hit has been the North East; losing 83% of property millionaires in the past two years. Wales has also been hard hit, losing 56% of its property millionaires over the same period.
No surprise though that, despite the decline in house prices, certain parts of the country remain awash with property millionaires, notably London and the South East, where 81% of all million pound homes can be found.
The capital is home to 57% of all property millionaires, with the largest share residing in Kensington (W8) where 48% of all properties are worth over £1 million. Outside the capital, Virginia Water in Surrey leads the property millionaire stakes, with 28% of homes in the area worth more than a million pounds, compared to a national average of just 0.88%.
Click here for regional breakdown and areas with highest proportion of property millionaires.
FIVE PROPERTIES UNLIKELY TO FALL BELOW THE THRESHOLD ANY TIME SOON
1. £25.9m Courtenay Avenue, Highgate, London
4. £15m Henstridge Place, London
5. £12.5m Clifton Hill, London
Add comment November 6, 2009
Welcome to the mega property portal
After many months, weekends and long nights since our acquisition of the PropertyFinder Group, our immensely talented Development and Tech team, led by CTO Simon Kain, successfully integrated all of our sites on to a single, world-class technology platform at precisely 04.00hrs yesterday (3 November).
It’s likely that if your reading this blog you may have come via PropertyFinder.com, HotProperty.co.uk, ThinkProperty.com or Zoopla.co.uk. All these brands will continue but are now ‘powered by’ the Zoopla.co.uk technology platform.
We’ve done this to combine the expertise of both businesses to create a market-leading proposition for our member agents and for the millions of home owners using our websites month-in-month out.
Our agent members will benefit from being able to upload to a single platform and automatically gain exposure to the enlarged audience of sites now powered by Zoopla.co.uk, including leading UK websites MSN, Yahoo, Virgin and Guardian.
Homeowners, buyers, sellers and renters will now have access to a broader range of features via Zoopla.co.uk including overseas property listings, a flat share service and email alerts.
All users will now have access to the unique features of Zoopla.co.uk including its unique appraisal leads service (AskAnAgent) and community tools that help homeowners, buyers and sellers engage with agents directly to discover local information via AskMe! Q&A.
We’d love to hear your feedback, so why not leave a comment below, talk to us on twitter or become a fan on our facebook page.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
1 comment November 4, 2009
Pyrotechnic Property Values
With Bonfire night round the corner, we’ve compiled a list of hot areas where the fireworks have already gone off.
Here are the top ten areas where property values have rocketed over the last 6 months. The question is, will these areas sustain these gains, or will these gunpowder propelled property prices fall back down to earth?
We also took this opportunity to showcase our extensive and explosive fireworks knowledge (thank you Wikipedia).
Do you know your hummer from your horsetail or your dahlia from your diadem?
1. Mines in Midlothian – 10.49%
A mine is a ground firework that expels stars into the sky. Shot from a mortar like a shell, a mine consists of a canister with the lift charge on the bottom with the effects placed on top.
Property for sale in Midlothian
2. Horsetails in Hereford – 9.60%
Called Horsetails due to the shape of its break, this shell features heavy long-burning tailed stars that only travel a short distance from the shell burst before free-falling to the ground.
A Dahlia is Peony shell, but with fewer and larger stars. These stars travel a longer-than-usual distance from the shell break before burning out.
Spiders contain a fast burning tailed or charcoal star that is burst very hard so that the stars travel in a straight and flat trajectory before burning out.
5. Chrysanthemums in Cardiff – 7.43%
A spherical break of colored stars, similar to a peony, but with stars that leave a visible trail of sparks.
6. Bees in Buckinghamshire – 7.30%
The effect caused by stars swarming around.
Property for sale in Buckinghamshire
7. Sparklers in Stirling – 6.57%
A handheld stick like firework that burns over a long period of time (up to a minute) and produces a brilliant shower of sparks!
9. Catherine Wheels in Cumbria – 6.38%
It consists of a powder-filled spiral tube, or an angled rocket mounted with a pin through its centre. When ignited, it rotates quickly, producing a display of sparks and coloured flame.
10. Hummers in Hertfordshire – 6.25%
Tiny tube fireworks that are ejected into the air spinning with such force that they shred their outer coating, in doing so they whizz and hum.
Property for sale in Hertfordshire
Have a great Bonfire Night and here’s some good safety advice.
Add comment November 3, 2009
Witches hat come to mind?
Halloween is nearly upon us. For some this means locking the doors, turning the lights out and hoping the trick-or- treaters pass by quietly. For others it’s a chance to dust off the skeleton suit and perform mischief on homeowners or their property if no treat is given!
The UK is home to some of the most haunted and scary (no we’re not just talking architecture) buildings and sites in the world so we browsed property for sale in near some of these well known haunted sites and found properties that bear an uncanny resemblance to a witches hat – take a look below.
Let us know if you find any more properties that have a similar blueprint.
1. Property near Highgate Cemetery – home to eerie, crooked gravestones and dark overgrown passages
More properties for sale in Highgate
2. Property near Berry Pomeroy Castle, near Totnes – home to the White Lady and the Blue Lady
More properties for sale in Totnes
3. Property near Borley Rectory – ‘The Most Haunted House in England’
More property for sale in Essex
4. Property near Pendle Hill – nearby to Britain’s most famous witch trial
Property for sale in Lancashire
5. Property near Glamis Castle, Angus, Scotland – home to the ghost The Monster of Glammis
6. Property near Llancaiach Fawr Manor, near Caerphilly – the site of a bloody civil war between King and Parliament
Add comment October 30, 2009
Meet the king of buy-to-let – a former maths teacher
This video is currently doing the rounds and was first brought to our attention via The Rat and Mouse; London’s property blog and was first posted on the Renegade Economist blog.
It’s an unintentionally comedic interview with Fergus Wilson – the straight talking king of buy-to-let. There is a queen, but we don’t know where Judith was on this day but the interviewer certainly has his hands full with the straight-talking Fergus.
Here’s a little introduction – back in the 1990’s Fergus and Judith were busy taking maths lessons and writing school reports in Blackheath. They bought a couple of properties and realised that, helped by falling interest rates and banks very willing to lend, the rent more than covered the mortgage. As a result, over the last 10 years he and his wife have built up a buy-to-let portfolio of over 900 homes – all houses – worth an estimated £180m.
We now believe, according to the The Sunday Times, that the Wilsons are looking to sell the portfolio – maybe they’ve fallen foul of the market like other buy-to-let investors recently?
Here are some of his top insights and learnings…
1. “Flats are a lie…where poor people live”
2. “The smaller the house, the greater the increase in value”
3. “A property investor relies on the property going up in value”
4. “February 2010 house prices will go upwards”
We’d like to state that these are his views and not ours! Let us know what you think below.
1 comment October 28, 2009
