London loses deep-pocketed house buyers to Home Counties

Capital’s monopoly on luxury real estate market ends as purchasers prefer green space in the suburbs

BRITAIN’S richest home buyers are moving en masse from London to the Home Counties, research shows.

London’s most expensive postcodes have lost favour with England and Wales’s super-prime buyers, who are increasingly choosing the likes of Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Hampshire.

So far this year, more than a third of the top 1,000 most expensive home purchases in the country were made outside London, according to Search Acumen, a prop tech company. This was a 45 per cent jump since 2021, when the share was less than a quarter.

A post-Covid desire for green space has been key. Before the pandemic, the share of big-ticket sales outside London was 15 per cent.

St George’s Hill in Elmbridge, Surrey, was the number one location for the highest value home sales outside the capital in the year to date. It was followed by Highclere Park in Newbury, Hants, North Fambridge in Chelmsford, Essex, and Ridgemont Road in Ascot, Berks.

Surrey held the largest share of bigticket buyers after London, with 81 of the biggest purchases in the year to date. Buckinghamshire was the second most popular county, with 32 sales, up from 20 a year earlier. In Hertfordshire and Hampshire top-end sales more than tripled, to 28 and 26 respectively.

By contrast, big-ticket sales in Kensington and Chelsea – a long-standing favourite for the wealthiest buyers – fell by 45 per cent year-on-year, to 154. In Westminster, sales halved to 92, while Camden saw a 36 per cent drop to 53.

It reflects the fact international buyers – who are more likely to spend in central London than the suburbs – largely disappeared in the pandemic, Search Acumen said. In the first six months of 2022, international buyers accounted for 21 per cent of home sales in Greater London, according to Hampton estate agents, down from 35 per cent in 2018.

Overseas buyers account for 48 per cent of prime central London transactions this year, up from 35 per cent in 2021, but the top end of the English property market has become more dominated by British spenders.

Buying outside the capital also means the top 0.1 per cent of purchasers spend less. The average price paid across the top 1,000 sales so far this year was £3.4million – roughly half the £6.3million spend in 2021. Andy Somerville, of Search Acumen, said that “the days of London being the default location of choice for high-value house purchases are increasingly behind us”.