A house in Grosvenor Gardens looks like Britain’s grandest bedsit. Or so I thought when its owner — a man who adamantly wishes to remain anonymous — showed me round the £24m, 18-bedroom, seven-storey mansion in the stuccoed heart of Belgravia, with sumptuous views over the Queen’s back garden and only a touch of smog wafting from Victoria coach station across the road.
“You can’t buy a toilet for under £2,000 a square foot round here,” he rasped when I met him. “This house is worth £28m, minimum.” Why didn’t he put it on at £28m, then?
“Because I put it on at £24m.”
Right. The property made headlines when it emerged that this nameless individual was not selling through a predictable blue-blooded agency but instead via the lesser-known myonlineestateagent.com. The fixed fees of this Manchester-based outfit may have doubled in the past few years, but are still cheap at £549. A typical estate agent, by contrast, could easily charge rates of £400,000 on such a property: the cost of two typical British homes, or about one in the capital.
But life is never that simple in the shoulder-glancing world of the super-rich. The owner of this property does not like estate agents because, he says, “they only care about their commissions” and they talk in “sales spiel”.
Advertisement
Alas, now he himself has to master their patter. One reason internet sites are so cheap is that they don’t do viewings: owners show buyers around their own properties. And what works for a Basingstoke semi may be less practical in a building that, as here, once housed the American Embassy. So the seller now finds himself forced to market his property while retaining the horror of publicity felt by most people who’ve had money for a while. This conflict may prove impossible to resolve.
Still, not even that accounts for how strange it was to peer inside. The front door opened into a draughty hallway; paint was peeling here and there, and a rusty bicycle leant against a radiator.
The property was built as a grand house in the 1860s (“Please inform us if you become aware of any information being inaccurate,” says Myonlineestateagent, helpfully), then turned into offices and reconverted into a private home some 20 or 30 years ago. Lacking its own garden or permanent live-in neighbours, it retains, to my mind at least, a corporate chill.
The ground floor is denuded of books, furniture, pictures or rugs — anything that might make a home of a boardroom. Upstairs is a floor apparently rarely used, but with sumptuous frescoes and tatty rococo furniture. The overall look is dispirited oligarch.
Who do you think the prospective buyer might be, I asked.
Advertisement
“Someone that suits the house,” replied the owner.
Higher still, there are the many bedrooms, most with cheap-looking rumpled beds, flimsy Ikea-style chairs and old brown bookcases that looked like hand-me-downs from prewar offices. It’s as if nobody had tidied up, or at least not in the way one might expect if you were flogging a multimillion-pound mansion. Apparently the children have been instructed to keep things in order for viewings.
As the seller shuffled me from floor to floor in the groaning lift, it took me a while to realise why everything felt so odd. In all the rooms, there was not a single picture on the walls. No photos that I could see, no paintings or prints. Though the reluctant salesman has lived here for decades, the blank walls made it seem as if he had only just arrived, dumped various teenagers into respective rooms and fled to the kitchen. (Someone was hiding, invisible, behind the large island. A dog was yapping loudly.)
As of early February, the owner says that “about a dozen” prospective buyers had been shown round the property. Early and “serious” offers had been made. I asked him if he was worried about time-wasters. “No. Anyone interested will have the money.” Today, the property is still listed on the internet.
That sum of £24m buys you a lot of house, even in so-called prime London. But I left Grosvenor Gardens confident that I would live anywhere else. Don’t take my word for it, though: pop round and he’ll show you himself.
Advertisement
Show and sell
The competition from online agencies is rattling traditional estate agents. The past six months have seen ads from Sarah Beeny’s online Tepilo agency, as well as eMoov (backed by the former TV Dragon James Caan) and Sir Stelios’s easyProperty. There have also been commercials from Purplebricks — which floated on the London Stock Exchange in December, valued at £240m — and the less high-profile Housesimple.
The result is that even some of the oldest estate agencies are hiring luvvies to make ads and, in one case at least, a commercial for the big screen. John D Wood, a high-end agency set up in Mayfair in 1872, is showing Welcome Home in Vue, Odeon and arthouse cinemas in its prime sales areas of southern England. It stars the Zero Dark Thirty actor Anthony Edridge and “communicates the personal side of property”.
Also going for the soft-focus image is Fine & Country, which is set to launch what it calls “the first TV campaign by a premium brand estate agency”. Earlier this year, Your Move, which has 285 branches across the UK, ran ads on Dave, ITV and Sky, as well as Channel 4. Hunters, with 170 branches, began advertising on TV last year and is continuing in 2016.
This gogglebox glut is triggered by one thing: more competition. The online firm Housesimple says there are 2,600 agency offices in Greater London alone. Little wonder then that when it comes to marketing, a lot of agents are thinking inside the box.
Advertisement
It doesn’t end there. New research from the Future Laboratory and easyProperty predicts we will be using HUD (head-up display) glasses to virtually renovate and refurbish a property during a viewing; augmented-reality ”explorium” cafes will open on the high street for off-plan buying; and prospective buyers will check out neighbourhoods with personal drones.
Graham Norwood