Alright for some

THERE was a boom in sales of £1million homes in Scotland just weeks before a new sales tax came into force. A total of 36 properties with a £1m price tag were sold in March – the highest number ever in a single month. It came before the Land and Building Transaction Tax replaced stamp duty on April 1. Two thirds of the £1m homes sold were in Edinburgh. There was also a spike in sales of properties over £400,000 in March, with 644 sales registered compared with 238 in the same month in 2014.

Estate agents Strutt & Parker, said: “The massive spike in both Edinburgh and Scotland in the month before LBTT saw the average sale price in Edinburgh rise to £280,000. It had not risen above £240,000 since 2008.”

Ghost Town

37% of people buying property in the most expensive neighbourhoods of central London did not intend them to be primary residences.
"Belgravia is becoming a village with fewer people in it," said Alistair Boscawen, a local real estate agent. He works in "the nuts area" of London, as he put it, "where the house prices are bonkers" — anywhere from $7.5 million to $75 million. The buyers are super-wealthy foreigners. London is not the only city where the world's richest people leave their expensive properties vacant while they stay in their expensive properties someplace else; the same is true in parts of Manhattan.
Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council, said the situation had reached a tipping point. "They may live here for a fortnight in the summer, but for the rest of the year they're contributing nothing to the local economy. The spectre of new buildings where there are no lights on is a real problem."
One Hyde Park, an opulent $1.7 billion apartment building in Knightsbridge. It is rare to see anyone coming to or going from the complex.

Room with a view - £7 million

Scotland’s most expensive flat, yours for £7m. The penthouse is priced at offers of more than £6.3m or a fixed price of £7.3m to take it off the market immediately – smashing the previous record for a Scottish apartment, thought to be Whittingehame House in East Lothian, priced at £2.5m which sold in 2010. Selling prices in Edinburgh for whole houses have nudged £5m, while rural estates can go for far more.

It is no surprise that the newly-refurbished Hamilton Grand in St Andrews is the most expensive apartments in Scotland. The former hotel towers looks across the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and therefore has a legitimate claim to “the best view in golf”. It was bought in 2009 by US billionaire Herb Kohler’s company, which is creating 26 apartments, with prices starting from £2.2m and ranging in size from 1,133 to 2,780 square feet. Owners will share a roof garden with sweeping vistas over the golf course and coast, and the penthouse will have its own private terrace along two sides overlooking the 18th green. Jamie Macnab of Savills, which is marketing the Hamilton Grand in the UK, said buyers are likely to come from abroad. There will be a golf concierge and butler service in the building and residents will have access to the Old Course Hotel facilities and spa. Complimentary membership of the Duke’s Course is included and permanent residents can apply for a yearly golf ticket for the more famous links courses.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/scottish-news/top-stories/scotland-s-most-expensive-flat-yours-for-7m-1-2316884

Who's country does it belong to?

Scotland is on the verge of having its first Chinese laird. Wealthy Chinese investors are said to be scouring the property market to find a Scottish castle to buy.

Leading property agents are reporting a rise in interest from rich Chinese and Taiwanese buyers, who have made their fortunes in the Far East boom. Wealthy Russians are also snapping up prime properties in Edinburgh for the first time. Prices in central London have been driven up by wealthy Russians seeking a safe environment to invest. Agents say the next step could be the purchase of Scottish landed estates, which, even with thousands of acres, are relatively inexpensive compared to London. In Kensington, the average residence costs £2m.

Ran Morgan, head of Scotland residential property at Knight Frank, which has several properties over £2m on its books, confirmed an increase in interest from China. He said. “This year so far I’ve been out showing properties to Chinese, Taiwanese and Saudis. It’s something that we’ve seen growing for a while.” One of the biggest recent property sales in Scotland, by Knight Frank and Retties, was of 14th-century Stobhall Castle in Perthshire, which, despite a price tag of £2.35m, went to a closing date last October with six prospective buyers, three of them from overseas. “Of those one was Singaporean, one Belgian and one Canadian,” said Morgan. “If you’re a foreign buyer you want to be investing in a tangible asset. They will initially flock to London, tour round and get outbid, get disappointed and begin to look elsewhere. In our Edinburgh market we have sold three properties to Russians in the past six months. The Russians have never really been in the market before, and that is definitely a recent trend.”

Jamie Macnab, of estate agent Savills, said it had also seen an increase of interest in Scottish rural properties from China. “It’s a market we expect to grow. We’re constantly looking at how to attract Asian money, and we’re confident it will come. We had one young Chinese man who came into the Edinburgh office recently, hired a cab and then went to view eight properties in Fife because of the golfing interest. Golf is a key reason why the Chinese and the Koreans want to buy property here.”

John Coleman, head of residential and farm agency at Smiths Gore in Scotland, said: “There have been one or two large Chinese consortiums looking for investments in the UK and have looked at a few Scottish estates but we’re unaware of any transactions having gone through yet. They are testing the water, and they’ll do it in London first.”

At least three country castles on sale for more than £2 million have been sold or are under offer after buyers sought to avoid the end of the stamp duty holiday in last month’s Budget. Sales prior to the Budget attracted a 5 per cent tax, which has now risen to 7 per cent. Deals signed prior to change will have saved the buyer £40,000 on a £2 million property.

shooting estates rise

The multimillion-pound Scottish sporting estate market has had an extremely successful year in an otherwise relatively static property market, according to an estate agent.

The average size of estate has increased from 3700 acres to 4467 acres and the average sale price has increased from £.2.6 million to £3.5 million. Offers have risen from an average of 2% over the asking price to 6% over the asking price.

Robert McCulloch, an associate in the Edinburgh office of estate agents Strutt & Parker who specialises in the sale of farms and estates, said: “In short, despite the pessimism which inevitably accompanies the present ‘age of austerity’, the Scottish sporting estate market is in good health and appears set to remain so.”

Okay for some , eh?

The property ladder

Research by the Bank of Scotland, found that young people faced a financial struggle to own property, with the average price paid by first-time buyers soaring 113% from £57,929 in 2002 to £123,213 this year. With the threshold set at £125,000, many first-time buyers paying more than the average price of £123,213 will have to find an extra 1% of their property price on stamp duty.
The average property is now out of reach of first-time buyers in 95% of places, according to the fifth annual First Time Buyer Review. Edinburgh and Helensburgh are the least affordable places for first-time buyers and properties there are 8.2 and 7.5 times the average income of a first-time buyer household. The deposit required by first-time buyers has soared 238% since 2002 and the average amount put down for a first property in Scotland is £25,951 - 95% of an average full-time worker's salary. Five years ago it was only 35% of an average worker's full-time earnings.

"It is beyond the reach of people who are earning between £12,000 and £16,000 a year to save up for that kind of deposit. " Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance said. "People are putting themselves in more risky positions and it will be people who are on the low end of the income scale who will pay the price for that."

Housing charity Shelter Scotland said that an additional 30,000 affordable rented homes, not including general housebuilding, were needed by 2011. It said that more than 200,000 people were on waiting lists and 9000 households were in temporary accommodation in March this year.

For a socialist take on housing read Building Profits Versus Building Houses

And for a more recent article on the house property price bubble read here

Nor should we think of the lack of shelter as just a Scottish problem , of course .

A man, believed to be in his sixties, was found dead on a wooden pallet in the Place de la Concorde in the heart of Paris victims of homelessness and the cold . Another man, 62, was found dead in his car in Vanves, just west of the capital. The deaths have provoked new quarrels over the alleged failure of successive governments to provide lodgings for France's alleged 200,000 homeless people. One pressure group, Les Morts de la Rue (the dead on the street), claimed that at least 200 people, between 18 and 80, had died prematurely while sleeping rough in France in the past 12 months.

Jean-Paul Bolufer, the head of the private office of the Housing minister, Christine Boutin , said last month that it was "scandalous" that some relatively wealthy people lived in subsidised, publicly owned housing while others lived on the streets. a newspaper revealed that he was paying 1,200 Euros (£870) a month rent – a quarter of the market price – for a 190 square metre apartment in an upmarket area of the Left Bank. There were at "least 200,000" other well-off people living in subsidised flats in Paris, he said.

The New Landed Gentry

This Land is Your Land as the song goes - But only if you have the odd million or two spare .

For the first time in Scotland , plots of development land for single houses have been sold for £1million. Property experts estimate that the buyers will spend at least another £1million building a house on it .

It's , of course , Location , Location , Location - Two people have already paid more than £1million each for their separate plots of land in the 850-acre Gleneagles Hotel and golf resort , three other properties are currently under offer and wealthy people from all over the world are said to be lining up to make offers for the nine remaining plots, which are on sale from £850,000 and vary in size from 0.55 to 0.86 of an acre.

When completed, the 14 properties and land within the private gated development, to be known as The Queen's Crescent, will be worth in excess of £30million . Buyers of the plots also receive two years' free golf membership for two at Gleneagles, which would cost a total of £7800 and a free two-year membership for four people to the hotel's health spa which costs £4000.

"Uniquely for a development of this type, we will be providing a concierge who will live in the gate lodge " George Graham, development director at Gleneagles said , whose job-description no doubt will include tipping his hat to these new lairds as they pass by .

Last year it was estimated that the average cost of an acre of building land to developers in Edinburgh was around £6million and in Glasgow, around £4million.
A one-acre site can usually hold up to 60 homes of various sizes and with some penthouse suites in the centre of Edinburgh selling for up to £1.5million there are still big profits to be made.

And now you know why your kids can't get a foot-hold on the bottom rung of the property ladder .