The total value of London’s homes has risen to more than £1.8 trillion over the past year although the capital’s housing stock saw much smaller increases in worth than the rest of the country.
London’s 3.73 million houses, flats, studios and mansions were worth £1.282 trillion at the end of last year, almost as much as the annual GDP of an economy the size of Italy, according to estimates from agency Savills.
However that was only 0.4%, or £8.1 billion, higher than the previous year as London’s property market continued to be the slowest growing of any region in the UK.
But it still accounted for more than a fifth of the UK’s £8.679 billion total housing value.
Over three year’s London’s collective property value has gone up 13.8% or £222.2 billion. The next most valuable region is the south east on £1.639 billion.
With outstanding mortgage debt standing at £1.66 trillion, according to the latest Bank of England records, that meant net housing wealth exceeded £7.0 trillion for the first time last year, equivalent to almost 81% of the total value of UK housing. Of this, almost half – a record £3.34 trillion – was held by mortgage-free homeowners.
Lucian Cook, Savills head of residential research, said: “The growth in house prices over the past three years has added considerably to the paper wealth of homeowners, driven in no small part by the well-documented ‘race for space’ over the period,”
“The total value of all housing has risen by almost a quarter since 2019, while outstanding mortgage debt went up by a lower 11%. So, while outstanding borrowing increased by £168 billion, the growth in the total equity pot was well over nine times that figure at £1.46 trillion.”
