A new reason to dislike estate agents
Plus London's most expensive flat, Papal moneypits and fake drugs
This just in: Estate agents can be dicks
We’ve been writing this newsletter for a few weeks now and we’ve barely touched on the subject of property. As London by-laws state that we have to mention estate agents or house prices at least once a month, here’s some building-related bits to chew on.
First up: Foxtons have decided to start acting like parasitic shit heels again.
The first thing to know is that the company that once did their best to make everyone dislike Mini Coopers, have borrowed about £4.4m from the Government in furlough money, and also received £2.5m in business rates relief. Despite pressure from MPs to pay that money back, they have instead decided to:
Buy rival London agency Douglas & Gordon for £14.25 million
Hand £1.8m to their investors
Plough £3m into the property startup Boomin (set up by the co-founder of Purplebricks)
At the same time their revenues have “surged 24% year on year to more than £28m in the first three months of 2021”.
Winkworths also saw a surge in property sales recently. So what did they do? They repaid their furlough loan, obviously.
The reason estate agents business is booming again is mostly due to the Stamp Duty Holiday, which has pushed house prices up. According to City AM, if you’re a first time buyer in Islington, Haringey, Hammersmith or Fulham then you can expect to be paying upwards of £73k more than this time last year. That’s about a 12% rise.
A trippy, virtual journey into London a hundred years from now
It never goes well when people try and predict ‘how we’ll live in the future’ (flying cars, meal pills etc) but that hasn’t stopped think tank Chatham House having a go.
As the institute is 100 year old this year, they’ve decided to mark the occasion by creating a slightly bizarre “3D digital model” designed to “allow the public to explore the future of city centres, using Piccadilly Circus as its location” (Chatham House is based in Piccadilly Circus).
Over at Futurescape London, you can explore the West End as it might look over the next four generations, all the way up to 2121 when London seems to have eliminated those ‘living statue’ street performers and instead created a space where “low gravity marketing pods simulate Lunar and Martian lifestyles,” and, “pedestrians traverse the space in highly adaptive and expressive AI clothing.”
Plus, there’s canals everywhere thanks to global warming. So we’ve got that to look forward to!
Tall building news
Depending on where you get your tall building news, you might have heard that there’s fewer skyscrapers being planned for London, or that the number is going to go up.
Both headlines are kind of true, and they both come from New London Architecture’s 2021 Tall Buildings Survey. The report found that, on the one hand, in 2020 work started on way fewer buildings of 20 storeys or more (24, as opposed to 44 in 2019); but there was also “a 10.8% increase in approvals for tall buildings… with 72 full permissions granted during the year – up from 65 the previous year.”
All in all The City of London has green lit more than 2 million square feet of new office space so far this year, which seems rash given that Reuters described the Square Mile as “a ghost town” just this week.
Expensive building news
We mentioned Nick Candy last week as he’s the man attempting to raise funds for Shaun Bailey’s doomed campaign.
As well as helping to fund unsuccessful mayoral candidates (and being married to that woman who used to be in Neighbours), Nick (along with his brother) is the developer behind One Hyde Park, the “most expensive residential development in the world.”
Now Nick is selling his £175 million penthouse apartment in the building (aka “Britain’s most expensive ever flat”) and The Times has had a good snoop round all 18,000sq ft of the place: “Five bedrooms, two terraces… a private spa and gym, a media room, cocktail bar, champagne room and a wine room for 750 bottles.”
There’s also a handy infographic to let you know how many Gulfstream Jets you could buy for the same money (answer: three).
Holy building news
Believe it or not there is someone looking to sell an even more expensive London property right now. And that person is… The Pope.
60 Sloane Avenue in Chelsea, is a “luxury building” owned by the Vatican, and it’s worth abut £200 million. But, according to Bloomberg, the place (which used to be a car showroom… a Harrods car showroom) is a “toxic asset” thanks to the “mistakes or fraudulent acts” made during the acquisition of the building which saw “high fees pocketed by middlemen.”
As a result the Vatican has lost somewhere between 66 million pounds and 150 million pounds on the Chelsea moneypit, and now they want to flog it to someone who can turn it into luxury flats. It's what Jesus would have wanted.
And the rest
Apparently, too many Met police officers are listening in to high speed car chases for “entertainment” and it’s costing the force money so they’ve had to issue a blanket warning to ask them to stop.
In response to the BBC’s diversity lead saying that Idris Elba’s Luther wasn’t ‘black enough’ Stephen Bush of the New Statesmen explains why Luther would have no black friends: “The number of black officers in the Metropolitan Police is vanishingly small: just 3.5 per cent of London’s police force is from a black background.”
A car rental company has done a survey into our mask wearing habits, including which Underground line has the least number of mask wearers. Obviously the unspoken message here is “public transport is bad for you” so take it all with a pinch of salt, but you might want to avoid the Circle Line for a bit.
Camden Market’s first ever pub opened last week. The Farrier has a “three Michelin star trained chef” in the kitchen and on Mondays he’ll be turning out ‘Roastie Toasties’, that’s “roast dinner leftovers on house made focaccia with cauliflower cheese sauce and your own personal gravy jug.” We can’t work out if that sounds great or just weird, but we’re willing to give it a go (if you’re nearby please report back with a review).
The Bourdon Street Chemist in Mayfair is half pharmacy and half art installation. It is an actual chemist, just with one key difference: everything in there is made of felt.