Sale of 18 flats at Clarge Mayfair on Piccadilly rakes in £210m but deepens fears of a foreign investor-led house price bubble

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Four luxury apartments in a development with views of Buckingham Palace have broken the price record for properties in London’s Mayfair – an announcement that will add to fears that wealthy foreign buyers are fuelling a housing bubble in the capital.

British Land, one of Britain’s biggest developers, said it had sold 18 of the 34 flats in its “super-prime” Clarges Mayfair development for a total of £210m – an average of just over £11.6m each – even though work only began on the site earlier this year.

Four of the flats sold for more than the previous Mayfair record price of £5,000 per sq ft, with one penthouse understood to have broken through this barrier by a substantial margin.

The company said Clarges Mayfair boasted an “unrivalled” location close to Bond Street, with the upper floors offering “panoramic views” of Green Park and Buckingham Palace. The gated mews development includes a private “wellness spa” with a 25m swimming pool, gymnasium and sauna, plus private cinema room.

When work finishes in 2017 there will be 34 apartments spread over 10 floors, ranging in size from one to five bedrooms.

British Land said it had targeted “an exclusive list of known potential buyers”,

Tim Roberts, Head of Offices and Residential at British Land, said: “Interestingly, over half of the apartments at Clarges Mayfair have been sold to British or British-based buyers.”

The sale could be heading for an even bigger jackpot when it offloads the remaining flats after it emerged that 16 of the 18 properties sold so far were on the fourth floor and below.

The Clarges site was bought by British Land in 2012 for £129.6m, and the deal involved the developer finding a new home nearby for the Kennel Club, whose HQ was in the middle of the site.

British Land cited “buyer confidentiality” for not disclosing the individual sale prices for the flats.

News of the record sale prices comes days after figures were published showing that one in five homes sold last year in London’s most exclusive boroughs – Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, and in the City of London – were bought by wealthy overseas buyers. At the time, the Labour party said Londoners were being priced out of the housing market by foreign buyers who viewed London property as an investment, “and in many cases leave properties empty as ghost homes”.

In its September residential market update, estate agent Knight Frank said there were signs that the crisis in the eurozone had fuelled increased demand for prime central London properties from those seeking a “safe haven investment location”: between January and August this year, Italians were the biggest group of prime central London overseas buyers, accounting for 6% of the total, followed by French and Russian buyers (4.1% and 3.8% respectively).