Super-rich overseas property hunters are increasingly buying luxurious apartments with private security because of concerns about their personal safety, a study has found, as sales of homes over £15m in London rose in 2023.
Wealthy people are buying newly built flats in “high-security super-luxury apartment buildings offering concierge security and amenities” in some of the capital’s most affluent neighbourhoods, according to the research by the high-end estate agency Beauchamp Estates and property service LonRes.
The study found that flats in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Hyde Park and Whitehall were selected, rather than houses, amid heightened “concerns over personal security and privacy”.
Billionaire and multimillionaire buyers spent a combined £1.3bn on 54 luxury London properties selling for more than £15m each in the 2023 calendar year, up from £1.05bn on 49 properties in 2022. The buyers were mostly from the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or China.
There was a 137% increase in the number of “super-luxury new-build London apartments” sold for over £15m to 19 worth a combined £385m. This was an increase from eight worth £181m in 2022.
The super-rich have been warned by their advisers that they could soon expect people with “pitchforks and torches” coming to look for them unless they do more to use their fortunes to help the millions struggling with the cost of living crisis.
At an investment conference organised by Spear’s wealth management magazine, members of the global elite and their financial teams were last year warned by progressive advisers that there was a “real risk of actual insurrection” and “civil disruption” if the yawning inequality gap between rich and poor was allowed to widen as a result of energy and food price rises hitting squeezed households.
The wealthy are prepared to pay considerably more for apartments than houses on a per sq ft basis, according to the research, which analysed Land Registry filings. Super-prime apartments sold for an average of £4,306 per sq ft compared with £3,011 per sq ft for houses. One apartment in Mayfair sold for more than £8,000 per sq ft.
There was a flurry of luxury house sales in the final weeks of the year, which Beauchamp Estates said was probably due to “when many wealthy overseas families are in London during late November and December doing Christmas shopping in Harrods, Selfridges, Sloane Street and Bond Street they also take the opportunity to visit trophy homes in the UK capital and agree major property deals”.
The agency added: “Just like domestic high-street shoppers identifying want to purchase but taking their time before they actually buy the world’s super-rich have waited for the Christmas sales before doing a flurry of big purchases in London’s trophy real estate market.”
Just before Christmas, the Indian billionaire Adar Poonawalla, known as “the vaccine prince” because of his family’s vast vaccine factories, agreed to buy a house in Mayfair for £138m.
Poonawalla’s Serum Life Sciences company is buying Aberconway House, which at 25,000 sq ft is 24 times the size of the average English home, from the daughter of the late Polish billionaire Jan Kulczyk. Poonwalla is familiar with the house, having rented it from Kulczyk’s daughter for £50,000-a-week since 2021.
However, the UK’s two most expensive properties on the market have failed to sell. They are 2-8A Rutland Gate, a 45-room “private palace” overlooking Hyde Park, whose owners are looking for bids in the region of £200m, and The Holme, a 40-bedroom house set in four acres of Regent’s Park, which is on the market for £250m.
