Becky Fatemi is used to matching clients — no matter how selective — with the perfect property. But in 2022, one tried something new: he would only buy a property if it had his dog’s approval. “The dog would come in, the dog would look around. If the dog liked it, he’d buy the house,” says Fatemi, executive partner at Sotheby’s International Realty. “They bought a house in St John’s Wood. The dog loved it.”
A handful of these super-prime deals are conducted every week in London. According to Knight Frank’s research, there were 147 sales above $10 million (£7.9 million) between January and September this year. Buyers flock towards the “Platinum Triangle” of Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge, as well as Holland Park, Hampstead and Highgate. Some come from overseas, some are born into family wealth, and there is an emerging breed of younger, tech start-up types.
“It’s a mixed bag, but effectively you are only speaking about billionaire families at this sort of level,” says Grant Bates, head of private office at Hamptons. “It’s very rare that it’s their only residence. I sold to a family in Holland Park recently who have six or seven houses within a quarter-mile radius.” Despite the existence of programmes like Selling Sunset and Buying London, it remains an elusive world where most properties are sold off-market, where confidentiality is king — and where clients can ask for whatever they like.
You are only speaking about billionaire families at this level
“The main difference is the discretion,” says Hamish Eggins, partner in Knight Frank’s prime central London developments team. Rather than listing on portals, agents take what Eggins calls a “targeted approach”, curating a handful of billionaire buyers for each property. At Knight Frank, he says, they will track the movements of private equity firms, look at memberships of certain clubs, develop their networks and conduct thorough research into potential clients. “I know what [the client’s] dog’s called, I know his favourite champagne. I know where he skis, where he summers. It’s a relationship built up over years.”
Buyers are also vetted carefully, which may involve providing proof of funds, answering “touchpoint questions”, providing IDs and, occasionally, passport details. NDAs, says Eggins, are common and would cover personal information about both parties and details about the property. On marketing materials, the floorplan is password protected, or not included at all. Bates, for example, is currently selling a property where “the only plans that are visible to anyone outside of me and the client are with Scotland Yard”.
Bates has also grown accustomed to high security at viewings: bodyguards, armed security, facial recognition (registered in advance), police on standby, phones in bags on arrival, signal blockers. “There’s an insane amount of security at times,” he says. “The difficulty is that you can get into a bit of a stand-off situation, because the seller doesn’t want to give too much information away about the house and the representative or the family office don’t want to give away too much about the principal. You have to use your gut feel alongside the due diligence you’re able to muster about whether the buyer is genuine.”
Besides the challenge of actually getting the buyer into the property, the viewings themselves require detailed preparation. “We will of course set the temperature to medium. We will make sure that the curtains are a little bit pulled back – but not too pulled back that they show the apartment naked. If it’s winter, the fire will be on, the music will be set. We’ll make sure the client has flowers in there,” says Eggins, who is currently selling a £44 million penthouse in Chelsea Barracks with its own bespoke scent. “This is a discretionary market. It’s not needs-driven. You need to make sure that the person walking in can imagine themselves living there immediately.”
Fatemi has employed a full-time runner to set up her viewings, and will rearrange furniture if needed, working with scent houses and lighting specialists to show the property at its best. “We’re staging an experience.”
Staging too is important. Fatemi works with art galleries like Alon Zakaim, Halcyon and The Gagosian to source artwork for her clients’ walls. If the house is empty, she will rent a furniture package from staging company Burbeck. For a £40 million house, this might cost £60,000 to £80,000 for a six-month rental, but can rise to up to £200,000, depending on what her clients are willing to spend. “All of these things are vital,” she says. “If you’re selling a £40 million house and the garden is not landscaped, there’s no point.”
Some clients, though, want big, costly and unusual changes to the property. For Bates, there was the client who wanted the lift moved at a £3 million expense, or the person who asked for a solid gold temple to be built into the apartment (“we had to draw up plans to restructure the study space and get quotes to ship in solid gold and marble… it was close to £1 million.”)
He recently sold a newly refurbished house in Fulham whose main selling point was its new, luxury amenities. “The first thing the buyer requested as a condition of the sale is that the clients rip out the whole cinema, pool and sauna,” Bates says. “This wasn’t a negotiation tactic. They just didn’t want those things in there. They bought it because it was a few streets away from a friend.”
On another occasion, his client wanted everything in the house he was buying to be brand new. When he found out that the seller’s daughter had stayed there for a weekend, he demanded that all the appliances, bathrooms and toilets in the property be replaced. “Again, it wasn’t a negotiation tactic. They even paid a small amount on top to assist with the renovation of what was already a brand-new house.”
For Fatemi, clients have refused to transact while Mercury is in retrograde (”It comes up quite a lot”), some specify that they will not consider a property where someone has died, while others, agents say, will only transact on specific dates of the year or decline unlucky house numbers. Bates had a client who refused to have anyone in the same room as him at viewings — “His assistant would shimmy you out while he looked around.” And recently, he was on a Teams call with a client whose two assistants responded for him in the third person (“he didn’t say a word to me”). “A lot of the time this clientele gets their way, regardless of whether you perceive it to be reasonable,” he says. “We quickly become immune to it.”
“When you get to this sort of level, they’re very successful people on both sides. With that comes an ego,” says Lee Koffman, director at Robert Irving Burns. “Managing the egos becomes a major part of selling a super prime property.” Koffman once sold a “very expensive house” where, at 11pm on the evening before they were due to exchange, his client requested an additional £500,000 from the buyer. “My reaction was: ‘Do you really want to go there for half a million?’” The seller did.
Super-prime agents are expected to be what Koffman calls “the complete package”. Not just finding and selling properties, but amassing knowledge of and relationships with currency exchange providers, interior designers, solicitors, art galleries, staging companies — anyone that their client might conceivably need. “You don’t ever want to say, ‘Let me get back to you’.” For Koffman, his little black book is his phone: “It’s my bible”. Fatemi uses a Filofax (“it’s older than me — it was my mother’s”) and has 60,000 contacts on her phone, each labelled with notes. Two hundred people have been blocked. Why? “They were rude or unprofessional.”
The work, predictably, is round the clock, with agents being available 24/7, leaving holidays early, working late and having to drop everything for a viewing. “It’s the adrenaline,” says Fatemi. “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lord Rogers, Norman Foster, Sir Terry Farrell, Zaha Hadid, Tessa Kennedy, who designed the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. These are icons of our time. It’s like working in the music industry and having worked with David Bowie, or the Beatles.”
Super luxe homes on the market now
St John’s Wood, NW8
£59.95 million
A 10-bedroom, 30,000 sq ft house on Avenue Road with amenities including a concealed car lift and hairdressing salon. sothebysrealty.co.uk
9 Mulberry Square, Chelsea Barracks, SW1W
£44 million
Five-bedroom, 6,029 sq ft penthouse with interiors by Studio Atkinson and a wrap-around sky terrace. knightfrank.com
The Whiteley, W2
£28.85 million
Duplex penthouse with three bedrooms, a 360-degree terrace and Six Senses amenities. knightfrank.com
60 Curzon, W1
£24.75 million
Four-bedroom apartment covering 4,237 sq ft over a single floor, with interiors designed by Elicyon. savills.com
1 Mayfair, W1
£35 million upwards
Collection of 29 apartments, penthouses and townhouses developed by Caudwell, set for completion in 2026. 1mayfair.com
Garway Road, W2
£17.95 million
Six-bedroom, 10,000 sq ft new-build house with a Victorian façade. hamptons.co.uk
