Duke of Westminster Sells Expensive Houses to Build Cheap Houses
The Duke of Westminster arrives at the wedding of his daughter Lady Tamara Grosvenor to Edward van Cutsem at Chester Cathedral. Prince William will act as usher at the lavish service attended by 650 guests, including the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The wedding brings together two of Britain’s wealthiest families. Lady Tamara Grosvenor, 24, is the eldest daughter of the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s richest man, whose land holdings, including swathes of Mayfair and Belgravia, give him a personal fortune estimated at 4 billion. Date: 06/11/2004
WE all know that the London high end property market is out of control as all those rich bastards from other countries pile in to buy themselves a Mayfair mansion. And we all also know that there’s a terrible shortage of housing in London that normal people can actually afford to live in. Which makes it interesting what the Duke of Westminster is doing: flogging off some of those expensive Mayfair houses to rich foreign sods and then using the cash to build affordable housing that normal Londoners can actually afford to live in:
The property company owned by the Duke of Westminster has sold off £240million of luxury homes in central London amid fears the capital’s house price bubble may be about the burst.
Grosvenor Group said it was cutting its exposure to high-end residential properties after growing concerned that the rate of growth in the London luxury house price market was unsustainable.
OK, that’s the cash coming in, nicking it off Russian oligarchs and the like. So, where’s it going?
The company now intends to reinvest the money in rental homes in more affordable neighbourhoods.
Preston said Grosvenor Group is looking at securing up to three schemes, having already spent £70million on a site in the Bermondsey last year, where it intends to let homes.
And building homes in Bermondsey for rent is where it’s going. Sounds like a reasonable enough sort of plan really, suck the money in off flogging a few houses and use it to build acres more of them elsewhere.
And the really fun thing is to compare this with the difficulties that local authorities have doing the same. Whenever they try to flog off a few expensive houses so they can build more, cheaper, ones a few streets away there are mass protests, sit ins and demos. While the private market seems to manage this entirely without fuss.
Posted: 1st, May 2014 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
