Half the Maine Tower properties were bought by overseas buyers and range from £350,000 for a studio up to £1.25m for three bedrooms

The east London skyscraper has “a comprehensive array of elite lifestyle facilities” and boasts it is an “all-private tower” – meaning it has no apartments set aside as affordable social housing. And it has just proved that reports of the death of the capital’s housing boom may have been exaggerated.

At a launch event for the 41 storeys of luxuriously appointed living, more than 200 apartments worth a combined £140m were snapped up in just four hours: the equivalent of £580,000 of sales every minute. And the development won’t even be complete until 2019.

Both homebuyers and investors snapped up the flats, which started at £350,000 for a studio and went up to £1.25m for a three-bedroom apartment. The 67 swankiest flats and penthouses, on the top floors with the best views, will go on sale at a later date.

The scramble for Maine Tower flats came just days after the launch of another Canary Wharf development also attracted queues for properties costing from £395,000.

Maine Tower’s developer, Galliard, said the off-plan sales were made at two events – one in London and one in Hong Kong – and half the properties sold went to overseas buyers keen for a stake in the UK market. Of 230 properties offered for sale, 208 were bought in the first four hours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buyers beware … people queued for hours to get into the sale.

Chinese buyers are turning to overseas property as a safe haven for their money following a slump in the country’s stock market, and 50 properties were snapped up in Hong Kong. In London, 158 were taken by a broad range of purchasers. There were a number of Greek buyers, as well as other European investors and buyers from India and east Asia.

David Galman, sales director at Galliard Homes, said: “The volume and speed of sales at the Maine Tower launch was incredible and shows the confidence that buyers from both the UK and overseas currently have in the London market.”

The value of London’s stock of housing has risen by £563bn – or 61% over the past five years – and developers are rushing to cash in on demand. Some 54,000 homes are planned, or being built, in prime areas of the capital, most of them costing more than £1m.

According to the Land Registry, the average London home now costs £476,000 and accountants KPMG recently said first-time buyers now need to earn £77,000 to get on the housing ladder in London. Three months ago, housing charity Shelter identified just 43 family houses in Greater London that were classed as “affordable”.

Galliard said some sales were made to parents buying for their student children and that a number of overseas buyers had bought more than one apartment. UK buyers were a mix of investors and owner-occupiers, with a lot of the studios and smallest one-bedroom flats bought by those who had queued for hours to buy a property to live in.

Maine Tower will be the tallest of five residential buildings that make up the Harbour Central development in Docklands. The marketing material promises “a vast range of highly-specified properties and opulent reception foyers”. The tower has a gym, a cinema and its own private library.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bedroom in the Maine Tower development.

Nearby 10 Park Drive offered UK-based buyers 345 apartments, with prices starting from £395,000 for a studio. The 13-storey tower, designed by architects Stanton Williams, attracted 3,000 registrations from interested buyers and a queue of 100 people outside the launch.

Property prices in Tower Hamlets – the borough in which Maine Tower is located – increased by 13% in the year to May with the average pricing nearing half a million pounds.

Tracy Kellett, a buying agent for wealthy clients, said newbuild homes remained particularly appealing to overseas buyers, who rarely come to view before they buy.

Property expert Henry Pryor said developers were selling properties to overseas buyers in order to finance the completion of the buildings being sold. “To do this, developers will pre-sell some properties, but these can only be bought by people who don’t need a mortgage – a mortgage offer only has a six-month shelf life,” he said.

“The biggest market of cash buyers for these kinds of properties are overseas, so this is where the developers, agents and lawyers go booking hotel lobbies in foreign capitals and selling what is really a sterling currency option dressed up in bricks and mortar.”

Pryor said the yields that investors could make from renting out the properties were low, and that this could be the last time overseas buyers rushed to buy London property in this way.

“Markets move and the time will come when the international buyer is no longer in awe of London and ceases to see the merits of owning 1100 sq ft of soulless real estate thousands of miles from home,” he said.