LUXURY INVESTMENT INDEX
Camden Road, London NW1 £880,000 PROPERT Y FOR SALE Bedrooms
2
Bathrooms
2
A fantastic contemporary apartment with Balcony overlooking Regents Canal. Situated in the heart of Camden this amazing newbuild apartment has a hardwood flooring to hall, reception and kitchen, down lighters in all rooms, under floor heating, bespoake kitchen with stainless steel oven, integrated appliances and glass splash backs, high quality bathroom fit out, veneered interior doors with chrome fittings, video door entry system, canal view balcony.
Portland Place London W1B £895,000 APARTMENT 2 bedroom flat on one of central London’s premier roads near the BBC and Regents Park Bedrooms
2
Bathrooms
2
Small Study
1
Accommodation comprises; Entrance Hall, Reception room, Two bedrooms, one en-suite shower room, second bathroom, small study, separate cloakroom and kitchen. Lease period: 112 years (approximately) Service charge: £5488.74 per annum
www.Jeremy-James.co.uk
Brenda Broster Director, Phoenix Property Services, London
Gloria Stewart Property expert and award winning journalist based in the United Kingdom
71 www.investmentlifenews.com
‘ “We’re seeing a constant and sustained interest in the outlying areas of the capital city. These ‘satellite’ locations can represent both exceptional value and excellent returns for investors over the medium to long term.” Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, is house hunting in Holland Park and Chelsea, for a mansion costing approximately £30 million. This is in order to oversee the new Google European headquarters being built near Kings Cross London.
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2013
The apartment is arranged on the first floor of this popular portered mansion block a short walk from the shops in Bond Street and Regents Street.
London, for Schmidt, as for other millionaires and billionaires from around the world, is a very solid place to invest money. Top bracket properties are snapped up every day of the week in Knightsbridge, Regents’ Park, Belgravia and Mayfair as Russian oligarchs outbid each other. In the last thirty years apart from an occasional blip, property prices in London have increased regularly. Anyone investing for the long term can be assured that their money is really very safe. Nor are there any restrictions on foreigners buying properties. If you have the money you can buy anything you please. For moderately wealthy overseas investors there is a huge amount of choice. Paperwork to purchase a place in London can be pushed through in less than a month if you find a good lawyer. It is even possible to instruct your lawyer to perform a hand search to ascertain whether the local borough council has any plans to build a railway or another road for example near where you are planning to buy a house or apartment. Suitably qualified people can obtain mortgages of 70-80%. This can be interesting if you want to buy a property and then rent it out. There are numerous buy-to-rent deals. Even in the more central parts of London properties in the ‘Goldilocks’ price range’ (not to much and not too little) are freely available. Both of these above properties would rent out well. There is a shortage of rental properties in London at all times. When the right rental price is placed on a property it will rent out within about three weeks. Gaps in rental income are few for the savvy investor. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford” said Samuel Johnson, a famous eighteenth century English writer. Today there is more of everything: theatres, museums, a zoo, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guards, nightlife, jazz clubs. It is all available to be savoured in what remains one of the most vibrant cities in the world.
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CON T R IB UTOR S
Regent Canalside
ISSUE 01
and benefit. It seems that even at the start of the investment evaluation process our minds, often unbeknownst to us, are busily balancing a dip in the bank balance with some very important upsides. Compare for instance London and Singapore. On the one hand you have the UK’s capital city coming in at 17th most expensive in the world, and on the other hand you have Singapore coming in at number 5. It all depends on what the individual investor or homebuyer wants to get for their capital investment. You can observe the prime markets for decades and as some contributors to this article know, there seems to be very little correlation between ups and downs and mortgage rates. So what factors are influencing the cost of borrowing money for property investment purposes? Brenda Broster, Director, Phoenix Property Services, London maintains that it’s equity, not borrowing that drives property value in London. “We see all sorts of factors that have a direct impact on the pricing of both established and ‘new build’ properties. In our experience it’s new wealth, bonuses as well as domestic and overseas savings and investment that drives these markets. In short, equity, not borrowing is key.” Despite draconian new taxes imposed by the UK Government on property investment in the March 2013 budget, most notably an increase in stamp duty, overseas equity continues to roll into London, particularly for higher value houses and luxury apartments where price growth and transaction volumes have been surging. London is a big city and, whereas overseas investors express initial interest in central London, there is a considerable volume of prime property available in areas such as Elstree, Barnet, Harrow, Kingston, Putney, Richmond, Merton, Kingston, Bromley, and many more. London’s infrastructure is such that central London is easily reached from any of these locations, and they should also be considered by investors. For Broster, it is these outlying areas, rather than central London that may represent the best value to potential investors