London property market dwarfs the rest but has stopped booming

London property market is obviously loved by most property investors. Especially the super-wealthy ones and it’s not only due to the exchange rate because even for Londoners, they are struggling to buy a home sweet home.  There’s an article about its size and attractiveness in dailymail.co.uk  recently. The total value for the London property market is £1.5 Trillion (RM8.21 trillion) and this is twice as large as the next 9 largest UK cities combined. COMBINED. The city with the second highest property value is Bristol (the city I graduated from in 1998) and the total property value there is only £115.21bn (RM630.6 billion). Fortunately for Londoners, the price increase has slowed tremendously and it’s the slowest among all the cities. Take a look at the areas which are the most valuable ones. Obviously the higher the price, the harder for it to grow fast. (In fact when we look at all the top 10 most valuable areas, all of them have highly regarded universities too. Perhaps this is a good complementary factor too; education, especially in attracting international students too.)
Second article about London property market is in independent.co.uk and it talks about how ‘home sellers must be more realistic with their asking prices.’ (Yea, sounds painful but for the buyers who bought many years before, reducing a bit of their asking prices today is still okay.)  According to Rightmove, asking prices actually dropped 1 percent when compared to a year ago. It says that the mean asking price in London this month was almost £630,000 (RM3.5 million). This is more than 20 times average UK earnings. (Yea, 20 times of local currency and not in RM. Average salaries is around £33,000 per annum currently) Rightmove even have a time to sell the property statistics. Instead of 73 days, it is now 83 days. (Be reminded that taking longer to sell does not mean property prices are going to drop a lot, it may also be due to a slow market, high asking prices or inflexible sellers who refuse to cut prices further. If it’s the last reason, it meant the holding power is still there, for now)
Another article which is much earlier talks about reason to buy a London property today. It’s in mylondonhome.com It actually gave 5 reasons including the value of Pound which is already lower today than before the Brexit decision. If you are able to borrow from banks there, the rates are low! According to Financial Times, the property prices in London is already very low and is in fact lowest since 2008. There are  also many major new developments coming up which will certainly spice up the market. They include Columbia Gardens, Elephant Park, Embassy Gardens, The Nova Building and Royal Wharf. (By the way, there are over 20 major universities within Greater London itself. This does not include all other tertiary institutions which are not yet a university. I think for super-wealthy parents with teenage kids today, this is extremely important too. Here’s the list of all those universities) Happy following the London property market yeah. Cheers.
written on 24 Feb 2018
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