Good news for the “gin and jag” brigade living in Surrey — the county is the richest in Britain, with more valuable homes and individual property wealth than anywhere else.
A report by PrimeLocation.com today has found that Surrey’s homes are valued at £288 billion, topping the list of the country’s ten most affluent counties. The online property search engine also found that Surrey inhabitants are the richest when it comes to bricks and mortar, with an average property wealth of £255,125 per head.
Surrey’s commuter belt contains a clutch of Britain’s most affluent towns and villages, including Oxted, Virginia Water and Weybridge, and the county accounted for 5.1 per cent of Britain’s £5.6 trillion of property wealth. Its nearest rival is Essex, with housing stock valued at £252.4 billion.
Dorset, Buckinghamshire and East Sussex had a combined property wealth of £283.3 billion. Dorset residents were second to Surrey in individual property wealth, with an average value of £207,220 per head.
Nigel Lewis, property analyst at PrimeLocation.com, said: “Surrey has more commuter towns than any other county within easy reach, train-wise, to London. You can say it’s all footballers’ wives and rolling countryside, but really, it’s about transport.”
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Only one county outside the South, Warwickshire, crept into the list in tenth place. PrimeLocation said that it had an overall property wealth of £77.9 billion, at an average value of £145,431 per head. North Yorkshire came 15th, with an average wealth of £126,967 per head. Mr Lewis said that the North-South divide remained a distinctive feature of the market: “There was a brief period in the late 1990s and early Noughties when the gap looked set to close, but the recession has reversed that entirely,” he said.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research this week forecast that the divide would widen even further, with London house prices set to increase by 2.4 per cent this year while those in the North East would fall by 2.7 per cent.
Doug McWilliams, the chief executive of the CEBR, said that wealthy foreign buyers were supporting the capital’s housing prices: “We can expect an abundance of affluent French citizens to be shopping for homes in London if President Hollande’s proposed 75 per cent top rate of income tax is enacted.”
Property wealth
Surrey £288bn
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Essex £252bn
Kent £225bn
Hampshire £206bn
Hertfordshire £194bn
Devon £121bn
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East Sussex £101bn
Buckinghamshire £99bn
Dorset £84bn
Warwickshire £78bn
Source: PrimeLocation.com