It looks as though the rental market, at the higher end, has gone completely ‘nuts’. The reason being that, believe it or not, we are presently trying to find a suitable super, luxury mansion for an illustrious uber tenant to use for only a three months at, wait for it, an eye-watering rent of £50,000 plus per week.
To be honest, this reflects a new trend amongst certain foreign international clients who, in some cases, would prefer to pay an obscene rent, rather than purchase a property.
In a ‘bearish’ property market there are usually more properties available than there are buyers to purchase them and the negotiating power favours the purchaser rather than the seller.
I have to say that there is nothing more effective at ‘cooling the passion’ of a keen buyer than a property that is over priced. It is the biggest ‘turn off’ for serious buyers!
Even intelligent observers of the Residential Property Market, particularly in London, are being fooled into believing that Brexit and its uncertainty, is responsible for the slump in activity to date, when the cognoscenti know full well, that it is all down to the ‘fall out’ from Stamp Duty.
When Mr. ‘cack-handed’ Osborne imposed these draconian hikes in this tax in 2014, he thought, somewhat stupidly, that it was the Tory’s version of a Mansion Tax. Like all myopic politicians, he had no idea of the devastating effect it would have on other parts of the economy, such as retail spending and the UK growth rate. Continue reading