Loading ...Londoners Cashing in Flee to Suburbs as Home Rally Wanes
For equity-derivatives broker Andrew Adamson, it was a trade too good to pass up.
In October, he was offered 1,000 pounds ($1,700) per square foot for his London townhouse. Other homes in the area were going for about 30 percent less. Adamson accepted it immediately.
London’s housing market, having outperformed the rest of the U.K. with price gains of more than 50 percent in five years, is cooling as owners like Adamson cash out. They’re leaving the city for less costly suburban and country homes because they expect mortgage rates to rise and new lending rules to damp prices. London estate agents had the largest increase in instructions to sell homes in Britain in June and the biggest drop in people seeking to buy them, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
“Now is the time people are cashing in,” said Adamson, 46, who used the 2 million pounds he raised from the sale to buy a country manor in Hampshire, southern England, for 400,000 pounds less. “I caught it before everybody else started talking about it. As soon as everybody starts talking about it you’ve missed the best deal.”