If you are looking to invest your substantial fortune in a rural rectory or a smart townhouse, but don’t want to be distracted by more modestly priced dwellings, a new website might be for you. Millionplus.com features only homes priced above — you guessed it — £1m. A kind of rich man’s Rightmove, you might say.
Paul Welch, its founder, wants to create an exclusive network that will not only cater for property, but provide “boats, jets, finance and luxury items”. At present, it sources its homes from Zoopla, one of Rightmove’s rivals, but Welch says homeowners will soon be able to upload houses directly onto the site, free of charge — thus bypassing agents and saving on commission.
A millionaires-only portal may not appear to sit well with the age of austerity, but it reflects a growing trend in the property market. Since the downturn, £1m-plus sales have boomed. In the capital, Hackney, Lewisham and the City of London have seen seven-figure sales roughly double in 2010 and 2011 compared with 2006 and 2007, according to data from Savills estate agency.
Outside London, top-end sales in areas such as the Cotswolds, West Berkshire and Brighton and Hove grew by 40% during the same period, while in Oxford, the number of sales above £1m rose from 33 in 2006-07 to 83 in 2010-11. (See panel, below, for the top 10 areas by £1m-plus sales inside and outside the capital). Prime central London and southeast England far outstrip any other region at this level of the market.
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Yet prices are not rising in all the top brackets. The 7% stamp-duty rate on houses priced above £2m, introduced in the March budget, has created downward pressure on the market around that point.
Wealthy foreigners have been the strongest driver — especially when it comes to expensive flats with large lateral spaces. Knight Frank estate agency estimates that they account for nearly two-thirds of purchases above £1m in London.
Last year saw record sales in the capital and the country. Lord Bagri, the Tory peer, sold Hanover Lodge, in Regent’s Park, for £120m in November — the most expensive sale in Britain to date. In August, a Russian billionaire bought Park Place, a country house near Henley-on-Thames, for £119m, according to Land Registry figures.
Whether multimillionaires looking for a house will be logging on to the new site from the Middle East or Kazakhstan remains to be seen.
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