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PROPERTY NEWS Zoe Dare Hall
Where there’s HOPE
Zoe Dare Hall asks London estate agents where the property market is going to look sunniest in 2023
In what is reliably the dreariest of months, we need good news. Yet when it comes to the prime London housing market, we may need to dig deeper than previous new years to find rays of hope.
Set against a volatile geopolitical backdrop that’s bringing out concerns over rising interest rates and the cost of living, many households have to keep their powder dry this month. “Fall throughs are up by 80 per cent on pre-pandemic times, and under offers are down by 20 per cent compared with the same time last year,” was LonRes’s summary of the market in late 2022. In a turnaround from the Covid-fuelled flight to prime fringe areas with good family-sized houses, LonRes pinpoints a big drop in houses going under offer in the “mortgage-dependent” affluent suburbs. But house offers in prime central London saw a 38 per cent rise in October and prime London rents have hit an all-time high.
Knight Frank also paints a mixed picture, with estimates of a three per cent fall in prime London prices in 2023. Yet HNW individuals rank London as the world city they’re most likely to invest in this year or next, according to Knight Frank’s Global Pulse survey.
When it comes to specific areas, Kensington is dividing opinion. Knight Frank points to a buoyant market for £10m+ properties and a choice of super-prime new schemes. Yet James Hyman at Cluttons is gloomier about the mid-market. “For £900,000-£1.3m, you can get a two-bed flat – and most on the market aren’t even going under offer – whereas in 2016 you would have been looking at one-bed flats for that price,” he comments. He attributes the “stagnant” market to a lack of “aspirant first-time buyers, overseas and domestic investors and pied-a-terre buyers”.
More widely in prime central London, Hyman feels a correction in prices is inevitable – and helpful, to get things moving again. But it’s hindered by a “massive stalemate” between buyers and sellers. “Buyers are only viewing properties if the future correction is priced in. And sellers have a naïve optimism that everything will be fine in the new year because it normally is – and because you said their house was worth £2m in January, they can’t accept that it’s worth £1.8m now.” There are silver linings. Californians are piling into Marylebone, according to Samuel Richardson, head of sales at Carter Jonas’s office in the area. They’re capitalising on “a soaring rental market”, he says of buyers who are
97%
PRICE RISES IN NOTTING HILL IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2022 COMPARED TO 2019
25%
PREDICTED INCREASE IN THE POPULATION OF ACTON IN 10 YEARS
ONES TO WATCH Above: Hurlingham Waterfront on the Fulham Riverside stretch is set to launch in 2023, through Knight Frank. Far left: Chelsea Botanica in SW6, where prices start from £440,000. Near left: Properties in The Verdean, W3, from £375,000, join an influx of new homes coming in Acton
spending between £800,000 and £70m.
And our desire for greenery remains undimmed if Knight Frank’s sales at Chelsea Botanica in Fulham – where developers Mount Anvil have commissioned Kew Gardens scientists to take care of the landscaping – are anything to go by. Of the 133 homes, 80 per cent sold within the first few weeks.
The wider Fulham Riverside stretch is one to watch in 2023, thinks Christopher Jones, partner at Knight Frank’s new homes division, with several new highend developments including Hurlingham Waterfront coming to the market this year and “reinvigorating the property landscape”.
Notting Hill, meanwhile, remains resolutely on top, with sales in the first half of 2022 up by 97 per cent compared with the same period in 2019, according to Savills. New schemes such as The Auria, part of the Portobello Square regeneration project, appeal to families, says Daniel Martin from Savills’s residential development consultancy arm.
Dollar buyers are also drawn to Notting Hill, which will see the area continue to “defy economic doom and gloom” throughout 2023, thinks Cory Askew, managing director at Druce UK. “The chronically low supply, high demand and enduring attraction of residences in Notting Hill and the leafier streets of Brook Green and Ladbroke Grove make them pretty much bulletproof,” he adds.
Another hot-tipped location this year is Acton, the only London station that will serve both Crossrail and HS2. Acton’s population is set to grow by 25 per cent over the next decade (compared with nine per cent in
Ealing Borough as a whole). There are “large scale regeneration and infrastructure projects galore, with 3,734 new homes in the pipeline, 55 per cent of them already sold off plan,” says Emma Fletcher Brewer, Knight Frank’s head OUR BUYERS LIKE of City & East New Homes. Peter Wetherell at Wetherell argues that
MEWS HOUSES it’s the second-hand market in his areas of
BECAUSE THEY Mayfair and St James’s that will appeal most to buyers in 2023 – partly because of the DON’T COME WITH favourable price “compared to the pounds per GROUND RENT OR square foot achieved by new developments,” he says. And because with townhouses “you SERVICE CHARGES can control your own environment and, more importantly, control your level of outgoings. The question of running costs will be more prevalent than before.” The ability to control costs is also steering buyers to mews houses, says Billy Harvey, head of sales at Lurot Brand. “Most of our buyers have cash so they aren’t affected by rising interest rates, and they like freehold mews houses because they don’t come with ground rents or service charges.” L
