Hey all,
I just walked past academy gardens in central London and out of curiosity had a look at the going price online to rent there. A shocking £7000 for a 2 bed flat!
Estate agents usually have an affordability criteria of roughly 50% of your income. In order to meet that criteria, you need to be in a salary of 300k, which is more than many CEOs of large multinational companies.
Most London job salary’s in high paid careers seem to cap out at just over 100k, no matter how senior you go. Banking or c-suite seem to be the exceptions there.
Who would the target market be for these kinds of properties?
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They’re not really aimed at people who are living relatively normal lives working in London. They’re aimed at the global international elite. People who don’t really have to think about affordability criteria. There’s a load of people who would like to be in London for a bit and who can easily afford that price.
Rich people obviously and the planet has a lot of them. Britain has a horrible reputation around the world for always selling to the highest bidder, not caring about the consequences or where the money comes from.
My workmates rent near london bridge, god knows what it costs.
You could have a couple both on 150 or more, they may pay it for lifestyle experience
* Assuming you mean 7000 per month, I entered salary of £200k into a calculator and that gets you a flat at around £6.7k. It’s not unusual to earn 100k+ in tech or finance. So all you need is a couple in similar industries.
* Many of these properties aren’t actually real. Estate Agents want the “market rate” of an area to be as high as possible. Pushing prices up by filling Rightmove with high rents helps towards that.
* Many of the ads are just there to help boost the profile of individual agencies and also increase the numbers of queries. Even if you phone interested in the property they are often gone or unavailable. But they were never available in the first place.
* The real properties which are actually available to rent at the high prices are often geared towards say, executives who are being relocated to London from elsewhere and their packages include paid-for rent for X months. I know this because I’ve done it before where I was given accommodation for 5 months and the going rent was 5k. Location was excellent, property was cool, but it wasn’t 5k worth. However big companies often overlook it or are able to work out discounts etc.
* Some oft he properties are advertised at double, triple, or even more the going rate. It can be worth it, because of you get somebody like a Chinese graduate from a rich background who doesn’t really know any better, or doesn’t really care for the first year or so, then it can be pretty lucrative, even if the apartment sits unrented for several months.
There are tons of rich people in the UK? Especially London, it has been a supercity for literally 200 years at this point.
I imagine it’ll be a lot of finance/tech types or just generational wealth types who receive a monthly ‘dividend’. Also like someone else said, big businesses paying for staff
In one of my previous jobs, the MD was sent over to the UK from head office and given a £15k per month housing allowance.
You don’t seem to grasp how much people earn. CEO’s of multi nationals will make millions per year (granted a lot of deferred stock options).
£100k is not the cap in careers. It’s a fairly middling salary in tech, finance, law etc…
I assume it’s normally for rich foreign people
Rich couples
Corporate lets rented by a business for their staff
Kids of mega rich Saudis, Chinese etc who are studying in UK
Etc etc
It is near the very prestigious area containing Kensington Palace and numerous embassies, many royals and other high ranking figures have accommodation there. You are looking at the top of London salary range there.
Companies not individuals
How the fuck are CEO’S of multinationals only on around 300k a year?, No chance surely.
When I worked in London we had a client from the Middle East that owned a flat like that purely to stay in when he came to watch Chelsea. That’s who’s buying them. And it’s not even a massive waste of money when you consider he will probably double his money when he finally sells it.
A quick Google returns an average mortgage for a £500k house to be £2.1k per month.
Can you tell me who in god’s name would be renting vs. mortgaging either 2-3 half mil homes or a £1mil home lol.
These luxury places scream money laundering to me.
I lived in Sheffield and there’s a massive block of luxury flats that are 90% empty. Housing crisis… As if!
A lot of arabs
Likely people who make their money from more than just a salary.
Could be people who own their own business so make big money off the work of others or people that have a lot of money invested in stocks and high interest savings accounts.
First savings account I searched for has a fixed 2 years interest rate at 6.05%, maximum £2,000,000 deposit. Even if you pay the additional tax bracket (45%) on earnings, that account would bring you £66k interest per year if you have 2m to invest, that alone would cover most of £7k per month rent.
If they offer short term rentals it could also be businesses renting them for people who need to work away from home for a few weeks. Say if someone is going to be in London for a month, paying £7000 for the month in a flat could work out cheaper than £200-300 a night in a fancy hotel.
My son briefly dated someone who lived in one of those flats across from the Tate Modern, and I asked the same question. Finance. The answer was finance.
I’ve reviewed the income and bank statements of very rich people in my job over 12 years.
What you realise is that actually a CEO earning £300k salary a year isn’t that rich.
There’s quite a lot of business owners and non CEOs that are far wealthier. I regularly see people earning £1-3m a year, and not many of them are CEOs.
Property fund managers, oil traders, manufacturing company owners, vape company owners, 35 year old quant traders, Viscounts with family wealth… these are a few recent job titles I’ve looked at that are in that bracket
Chinese, Russian and Middle East tourists
A lot of them are companies paying for their high end or international/visiting staff.
* Young-ish front office finance professionals (investment banking, private equity …)
* Lawyers
* Some very senior software engineers
* Young-ish childless couples, bot of which are in good paying jobs.
* Foreign students from countries like China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and, until recently, Russia.
And it’s probably not even that nice inside
You have to consider that basic salary often makes up less than half of an executives income. Shares and/or bonuses are on top of that 100k.
A lot of CEOs earn more than 300k a year especially in London. Most of them also get a housing allowance or a flat/house they can use..
My husband and I live in zone one and his company _pay our rent_ because he’s an international import for a bank and an expert in his field. So I’m guessing some of them fall under that?
Our set budget was £3,600 and you’d be amazed how shit the flats are even at that insane price. Sure, we don’t have mould, but we also don’t have things that would be standard in some parts of the world, like aircon. The standard of finish is also pretty crappy for the price. The flat was built in 2003 and everything is at that standard. Cheap nasty laminate.
children of foreign oligarchs
£300k may sound like CEO money but it really isn’t. There are many regular jobs that pay high 6 figures. I’ve seen jobs in my industry, for experienced & specialized software developers pay up to £750k salary in London. There are other jobs in London that pay well into 7 figures.
Chinese students
I wouldn’t pay £1 to live in that shit hole of a capital.
>you need to be in a salary of 300k, which is more than many CEOs of large multinational companies.
Monthly maybe.