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City money is returning to the counties

Published 16th Oct 2009

Financiers turn to farmland as prices continue to rise


Money and land go hand in hand. The credit crunch might have been expected to put paid to the phenomenon of the lifestyle farmer — the City magnate who dons his wellies, packs his family into a Land Rover and decamps to Gloucestershire to commune with the soil. Very Spring 2007, you might say. Yet it seems that metropolitan money is returning to the counties. Knight Frank’s country house department sold 40 per cent more rural retreats last month than in September 2008. Maybe this is because farmland has outperformed the FTSE 100 share index over the past 15 years, or perhaps bankers are simply seeking a more socially acceptable job title.

“We are seeing tentative signs of a return of the lifestyle buyer,”Andrew Shirley, head of rural property research at Knight Frank, said in his quarterly farmland report.

This is attributed to the recovery at the top end of the housing market, enabling financiers to fund farm purchases with the sale of Notting Hill townhouses. Shirley estimates that lifestyle buyers make up 25 per cent of the total purchasers of farmland; Savills puts this figure closer to a third. “Lifestyle buyers are still very much in evidence for the right property,” said David Cross, director of Savills’ farm agency.

The limited availability of land has caused values to rise. Cross reports that supply is down by 16 per cent across the UK compared with August last year, and his office in the South West has “run out of stock after having had the busiest six months on record”. The Knight Frank farmland index shows that there are 15 per cent fewer acres available for sale this year than last, and that farmland values in England rose by 3.2 per cent to just under £5,000 an acre in the third quarter of 2009, the second successive quarterly increase.

Farmers also benefit from the weakness of sterling, as their subsidies are initially calculated in euros.

So what type of country estate is special enough to lure the financier-turned-farmer from the Square Mile? Moor Place, a Georgian manor house with 781 acres in the well-heeled village of Much Hadham, six miles from Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire, has form in this area. In 1886 it was bought by a former Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. Four subsequent generations of Normans lived at Moor Place, but his great-nephew, Bryan Norman, also retired from the City, is now downsizing and selling up. The Grade I listed house and estate are on the market with Strutt & Parker for a cool £17 million.

For this you get a beautiful red-brick manor house built in 1779 with 14 bedrooms, plus dining room, drawing room, library, kitchen, breakfast room, nursery and playroom. The total interior size is 18,891 sq ft, including two basement staff flats.

Separate accommodation includes a four-bedroom house with its own walled garden, five cottages and a two-bedroom flat in the Grade II* listed stable block.

In the grounds are a pool, tennis court, walled kitchen garden, Grade II listed summer houses, plus an 85-acre park, 38 acre of woodland and a small shoot. Then there is the farm — 640 acres of arable land and several agricultural buildings.

The reason for its price tag is proximity to London, which is 40 miles away, and 45 minutes on the train from Bishop’s Stortford. This raises the value of the land to £7,000 an acre, well above the £5,000 average, according to the agent, Sarah Macdonald-Smith. A buyer will need to take time out from farming to redo the interior decoration, which is English country house at its chintziest.

Source: ' Times '

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