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Is this £175m apartment London’s ultimate ‘giga-prime’ home for the super-rich?

Property developer Nick Candy’s Hyde Park penthouse has just been put on the market for a gob-smacking £175m.

Adding her input into what justifies this astronomical price, Black Brick’s Founder and Managing Partner, Camilla Dell has shared her thoughts in The Telegraph this week.

“It’s partly about rarity factor,” she said, “and partly about the world-class location. Its key factors are also security and provenance. It has become a famous landmark building with very large apartments overlooking Hyde Park, with very high-quality facilities. You just don’t find many of those.”

And then, of course, you have to account for the fact that this property isn’t just Candy-built, but Candy-owned. Camilla summarised:

“You’d assume he had cherry-picked the very best residence for himself. This market beats to its own drum. In other markets, we’re grilled about prices per square foot and whether it’s good value, but billionaires aren’t so bothered about that. It’s more about buying something prestigious and unique in the very best location.”

Read more in the full article here.

How to sell a home in the current property market

London might be a sellers’ market right now, but “there are always homes which stubbornly fail to sell”, writes Ruth Bloomfield in The Standard this week.

Reflecting on how best to sell your home, beyond adjusting your pricing, Black Brick buying agent, Caspar Harvard-Walls has shared why he believes the next issues are the chosen agent and property access:

“The easiest to deal with is access. As a seller, being flexible as to when potential buyers can view is crucial and if this is not the case, then you need to change it quickly,” he said in the article. “Agents will quickly tire of trying to arrange viewings if the owner or tenant is difficult.”

On agents, Caspar continued: “Too many sellers choose their estate agent on the basis of their commission fee or whomever quotes them the highest marketing price and not on who is the best person for the job,” he says. “A good agent should be able to more than cover their fee.”

Read more in the full article here.

What the stamp duty charge for overseas buyers means for London

From April 1 2021, non-UK residents will now have to pay an additional 2% stamp duty charge on any England or Northern Ireland property.

Reacting to the announcement and what this may mean for the future of the UK property sector, Camilla Dell shared with with George Hammond of The Financial Times why she believed the new charge will in fact not deter overseas buyers completely:

“It’s an additional cost, but you have to balance that with how a [prime] London property looks to an overseas buyer at the moment: prices are still down 20 per cent from the peak [in 2014]; the pound is up but still cheap compared to the dollar.”

Read more in the full article here.

English property market rebounds on pent-up demand

Is the property market coming back to life yet?

In a new article for The Financial Times this week, Black Brick Founder and Managing Partner, Camilla Dell shared her perspective as a London buying agent for prime property:

“There is quite a big gap at the moment between buyers, who feel the world is not what it was, and sellers, who think they’ll just hang on.”

Read more the full article here.

Meet the estate agents turning themselves into superstars

As the world continues to go a *little* crazy in lockdown, some professionals in property are dialing up the fun-meter in a bid to grab attention and stay on top.

Offering her view on the trend, our Founder and Managing Partner, Camilla Dell shared with The Financial Times how in the UK, some high-end sellers simply do not want an online presence because of confidentiality and security:

“The property might have artwork and family photographs. Private individuals don’t want that kind of exposure or need that kind of exposure.”, she warned.

Read more in the full article here.

How to avoid getting into negative equity if house prices fall

With the global outbreak of the coronavirus, house prices here in the UK are likely to fall soon, leaving buyers with high LTV mortgages out in the cold.

Speaking on whether now would be a good time to make a deal in property, our Founder, Camilla Dell shared her thoughts in a new article for The Telegraph this week.

After a crisis, “we will always see a bit of distressed selling,” Camilla said. “There will be some undoubtedly, but I think it will be few and far between.”

Read more in the full article here.

Could the stamp duty holiday stimulate recovery of the housing market?

While the pandemic has brought about a standstill for the UK property market, the upcoming stamp duty holiday might just be the thing to bring it back to life.

Commenting on whether the government may in the future raise the stamp duty levy later on, Black Brick’s Camilla Dell shared in Forbes:

“If you look at past recessions and the speed of the property market recovery, we can predict that the Treasury will most likely not raise stamp duty to make up for this until a year or so down the line, once property prices and transactions have risen again.”

Read more in the article here.

Calls grow louder for full-scale overhaul of UK property tax

Our Founder and Managing Partner, Camilla Dell has joined calls on the government this week to overhaul the tax system for UK property.

Commenting in The Financial Times, Camilla said that the 2016 surcharge, particularly for people whose house sale fall through and leave them with two properties, has created new administrative difficulties:

“The whole property tax regime has just become too complicated. It’s a headache,” she shared.

Read more in the article here.

Why London’s imminent property boom is not all that it seems

Prime central London property sales have “spiked in the wake of the election”, writes Melissa Lawford of The Telegraph.

Sharing his insight for the piece, Black Brick’s Caspar Harvard-Walls shared how, in his experience as a premium buying agent right now, everyone is waiting for the sales to lead to property price increases:

“It is happening, we can feel it happening on the ground,” he said. “Straight away, sellers who would have maybe taken 5 or 10 per cent off their asking price now won’t budge.”

Read more the full article here.