Discreet City buyers ready to pour big bonuses into housing market

Published 24th Oct 2009

City workers, their arsenals boosted by bonuses that seem certain to be bigger than expected this year, are priming their guns for a new property bidding war.

Buyers are reported to be active in the housing market only days after a prediction that they would benefit from £6 billion in bonuses this year.

Agents now expect that London house prices, especially in the most luxurious postcodes, will be boosted by a flurry of bonus-funded property purchases, which they say have started already and may stretch through the next six months.

Viewings from City buyers are already up, despite payouts not being expected until as late as March next year. Agents report that big payers this year are rumoured to include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and smaller players, such as HSBC Private Bank and Coutts.

Peter Rollings, managing director of Marsh & Parsons said: “City buyers are now feeling secure. We are going to see a flurry of fairly big deals in Kensington and Chelsea.”

Knight Frank, the estate agent, is reporting that 38 per cent of applicants are from the City, up from 30 per cent this time last year, in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse. One buying agent described the annual bonus effect in the capital as a “wall of cash”.

But far from the Loadsamoney image of cash-rich City types glorying in conspicuous consumption, many buyers — uncharacteristically — seem to be attuned to the resentful mood outside the City and are remaining circumspect about their identities and intentions. Lindsay Cuthill, head of Savills in Fulham, said: “Two years ago we’d be given a business e-mail, but many now hide behind their gmail address.”

The key areas expected to benefit include prime Central London postcodes, the South West suburbs and commuter towns in Surrey, despite some prices already having returned to highs last reported in 2007. Bidding wars for the best homes have again become commonplace.

Savills reports that one open house held last Saturday at a £1.95 million home on Bolingbroke Grove, Battersea, South London, attacted 150 viewings in an hour. Bonus money is also expected in second home locations in Cornwall and Devon.

Lucian Cook, a director of research at Savills, said: “There is some evidence of more supply coming to the market in these areas [most affected by bonus-laden buyers], but it is being snapped up quickly. It might mean, however, that the bonus effect is more about sustaining prices, rather than pushing them up higher next year.”

Ed Mead, a director at Douglas and Gordon, said that the effect of bonus money would be accentuated this year because the market was so thin: “It might even lead to an uplift in prices.”

Some agents expect a trickle-down benefit in some Central, but less glamorous locations in the capital. Jason Tebb, of Chesterton Humberts in Wimbledon, said: “The impact is felt throughout the market because bonus money is paid to all sorts of support workers, such as IT and HR, and feeds into it at all price ranges.”

The Centre for Economics and Business Research has upwardly revised its prediction for the total amount of bonus money paid out from £4.1 billion to £6 billion, albeit substantially down from the £10.2 billion paid in 2007.

New analysis from Savills shows that the average price paid by a cash buyer in the financial sector was £2.85 million in 2007 and only £2.4 million last year. Fifty per cent of buyers of prime property — that priced over a million pounds — are financial sector workers. Savills has predicted price falls in most UK regions next year, as unemployment and a squeeze on household incomes set in, with real recovery expected as late as 2013 or 2014, a warning echoed by Knight Frank. But agents believe that London can remain immune.

Savills’ research shows a clear correlation between increases and decreases in bonuses and rises and falls in the value of property in Central and South West London. It says that the number of cash buyers in the market is boosted by 75 per cent in the months that follow the payout of bonuses and transactions typically rise by 30 per cent. Buyers with bonus cash typically pay 51 per cent more for their homes than householders reliant on a mortgage, it adds.

David Adams, head of residential at Chesterton Humberts, says that even though job security in the City seems to be better, many will want to improve, rather than move, given that so few homes are available to buy at present. “In this post-recession era, bonus money is likely to be spent on downsizing debt, rather than mortgaging to the hilt for a trophy property,” he said.

Source: ' Times '

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