London Property - Home of Super Prime

London Property - Home of Super Prime We’re a digital marketplace and members-only platform for the people behind London’s super-prime

06/10/2026

Prime London has corrected. The more useful question is who moves while it has.

This week the FT described London as the property market's black sheep, weighed down by stamp duty, the non-dom changes and overseas buyers stepping back. After 30 years in prime central London, I read that less as a verdict than as a vantage point.

Beneath the headlines, the picture is more nuanced. Developers are moving capital out of London residential. That thins the future pipeline at exactly the addresses where good stock is already scarce. Meanwhile, Beauchamp Estates reports Gulf and Asian buyers acquiring whole blocks to hold for rent. That is capital repositioning, not leaving.

Two changes matter for owners specifically. First, the government has confirmed independent regulation of managing agents and caps on leasehold fees, a structural shift for a market so heavily leasehold. Second, mortgage costs for movers are at a 17-year high, so how a purchase is structured matters more than ever.

There is also a quieter point. An empty pied-à-terre is becoming expensive to hold passively, and wealth concentrated in a single home needs a plan, not just patience.

If any of this touches your own position, I would be glad to talk it through.

Email me — [email protected]

29/09/2026

Two forces pulled against each other in the London market this week.

At home, the tax pressure built. A new report claims London owners underpay £3.1bn a year under a council-tax system still pegged to 1991 values, reviving the case for a proportional property tax; Labour MPs, meanwhile, moved to close a loophole that cut one billionaire’s bill by £18m. The pre-Budget mood is unmistakable — scrutiny of how prime property is taxed is only intensifying.

And yet the capital kept coming. The National reports Gulf and Indian investors bulk-buying prime London — whole blocks, not single flats — drawn by rising rents and a shortage of stock. High-value mortgage lending is rising too, as the wealthy choose leverage as a planning tool.

The through-line, as ever: tax pressure at home, capital pull from abroad. Scarcity, not sentiment, still sets prime London values.

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25/09/2026

Renovating a listed London home just got harder.

Nicholas Boyarsky of Boyarsky Murphy Architects on the tension at the heart of period property: building safety on one side, heritage on the other. It used to be settled by negotiation on site with an approved inspector — a judgement call between people who knew the building.

Now regulators are taking a harder line, and the framework has tightened. Expect longer timelines and less settled informally.

DM me PRIME for the whole picture before you renovate.
With Nicholas Boyarsky [ tbc]

23/09/2026

For all the disruption of the last six or seven years, trust in Britain has held.

Marco Pasi made the point on the ground: Brexit, a run of changes in government, real political noise — and yet the underlying sentiment toward the country remains one of trust. Within Europe, the UK's system is still viewed as reliable.

That matters more than it sounds, and it is easy to underrate. The headlines move fast. The things that actually draw international capital to prime London move slowly: the rule of law, stable institutions, enforceable property rights, and a system that behaves predictably when it is tested. Price is what buyers negotiate. Reliability is what makes them commit in the first place.

It is worth being honest that this is sentiment rather than a data point. But it is the sentiment that underpins the whole prime market. When an international buyer chooses London over the alternatives, they are rarely buying only the building. They are buying the stability around it.

So the question for anyone weighing prime London against Europe: how much is reliability worth to you?

With Marco Pasi

22/09/2026

The Net Widens.

This week the tax net around London property broadened. The Chancellor is reported to be weighing a cut to the mansion tax threshold to £1.5m — down from the £2m first floated — which would more than double the homes caught and pull in thousands more London owners. Beneath it, the frozen inheritance-tax nil-rate band keeps dragging more estates into charge as values rise.

Yet the market is splitting. Prime central London now sits around 26% below its peak, and The Times reports British buyers moving back into Zone 1 to take advantage — even as 88% of inner-London flats listed last year failed to sell within six months.

Two speeds, one message: tax and tenure now matter as much as postcode.

21/09/2026

When the prime London market turns, not everything moves at the same speed.

Gary Hersham of Beauchamp Estates sees greater stability ahead — prices steadying, and likely beginning to rise. And he flagged a habit worth remembering: in the English market, sellers tend to lift their asking prices the moment demand picks up. The window where buyers hold the advantage tends to close quietly, and fast.

His sharpest point was about which assets win. The homes that sell quickest, and perform best, are the ready-to-move-in ones — where a buyer can walk in, hang their paintings, place their antiques, and simply live. Turnkey.

That reflects who is buying at this level. A serious prime buyer is rarely short of capital, but almost always short of time and appetite for a project. The premium sits with the property that asks nothing of them.

The practical read: if you are selling into a firming market, presentation is not a nicety, it is the price. And if you are buying, the finished homes will move first, so decisiveness matters more than it did a year ago.

Are you positioned to move before the sellers reprice?

With Gary Hersham Beauchamp Estates

18/09/2026

Lending is quietly opening up, and rental history is part of the reason.

Tom Tangney of Rose & Partners made the point well. If someone has paid rent reliably for five, ten or twenty years, they have already demonstrated they can meet a monthly housing cost. Lenders are starting to recognise that track record rather than ignore it and for a younger generation now looking to buy, that shift matters.

The wider picture supports it. Since regulators loosened the high loan-to-income rules through 2025 and into 2026, several major lenders have raised their multiples up to 5.5 times income on standard ranges, and up to 6 times for first-time buyers on dedicated products. Lending is their business. They need to lend, so they are working to make it easier.

A note of caution sits alongside the optimism. Higher multiples help affordability, but they also make it easier to overextend. More help is not the same as more room for error.

At the prime end the principle is the same, even if the numbers are larger. The real affordability question is rarely the headline multiple, it is which lender treats your income correctly, especially where that income is complex.

Is lending opening up in a healthy way, or storing up risk?

16/09/2026

It is far harder to build a property portfolio in prime central London than most people assume.

Angela Niering-Wren of Arbuthnot Latham put the structural reason plainly. Outside the established, corporately run estates, prime central London stays in the hands of individual private owners and replacing them, or aggregating their holdings into a large portfolio, is genuinely difficult. In the outer zones it is far easier.

The maths explains why. Capital values in the centre are high, so the cash input is large before you own anything. Yields relative to those values are heavily compressed, which makes servicing sizeable debt a real challenge. The relationship between capital in and income out simply does not stack the way it does further out.

The incoming rental rules tighten it further. With limits on how often and by how much rent can rise, and the end of marketing to the highest bidder, the old levers for improving a prime yield are being removed.

The takeaway for serious investors is not that prime central London is a poor place to hold property — it plainly is not. It is that the case for it rests on capital, not income. Confuse the two and the numbers will disappoint.

Are you buying prime for yield, or for something else entirely?

With Angela Niering-Wren [ tbc].

14/09/2026

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07/09/2026

The Renters' Rights Act has quietly moved the risk onto the landlord.

The old safeguard was simple: you sign and date the agreement, but you do not hand over the keys until the deposit and first rent have cleared. Today that protection is gone. You sign, then you ask for the money — and a tenant who intends to game the system can take the keys and leave you waiting.

With no-fault evictions abolished and the arrears threshold now three months before possession can begin, a landlord with a mortgage can be six to eight months out of pocket. Add the new limits on rent in advance, and an unproven tenant becomes much harder to de-risk.

The market is not broken — it is simply now a profession. So how would you protect yourself as a landlord under the new rules?

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