The Search for a Margin: Mission Impossible?

Bargain Terrace, Opportunity Avenue and Doer-Upper Gardens. As far as I can see, these are the lost streets of London.

We have money sitting unprofitably in bank accounts. There are people who would happily help finance the right project.

We have trusted project managers, builders and all the other people required to turn a renovation round efficiently.

What we don't have are the opportunities.

Prime Central London and its bordering boroughs seem bereft of value.

Doer-uppers are going to best and final bids and achieving done-up prices. There's simply no margin for the likes of me.

It's a worry for me, of course. But it's also a potential disaster for the whole market.

If someone pays the done-up price for a doer-upper, they are basically assuming that property values will continue to climb.

They are gambling that the money they invest on top of an already excessive purchase price will soon be recouped by ever spiralling values.

I wouldn't be so sure.

The market up to £2m seems hugely over-heated. UK incomes simply aren't growing quickly enough to support today's prices let alone further big rises. And although the supply of cash-rich foreigners may still be strong, many prefer new-builds to tarted up old-stock.

Lets take Fulham as a near-Prime example of where prices are out of sync with reality*.

This area's role historically has been as feeder to Prime Central or to family-oriented areas such as Wandsworth's Nappy Valley. Young, aspirant, newly qualified professionals would buy their first homes in Fulham, or house share with friends from Uni. Now it's rapidly becoming as expensive as the better parts of Notting Hill. Horrible little houses needing renovation are going for the best part of £2m in roads most of us wouldn't have been seen dead in a few years ago. And a house in a perfectly unexceptional road near Stamford Bridge is on the market at an astonishing £3.5m.

I just don't see where the money will come from to justify further hefty rises. How many young people can afford £2m for a house?

Then there's Battersea, an area that might define the term 'mixed'. Close by the faux-smart Prince of Wales Drive, for example, there are housing estates that taxi drivers refuse to enter and police only venture into mob-handed. Yet the so-called middle-classes are pouring cash into the area like it's the new Belgravia, and overseas buyers are snapping up off-plan flats in that desert of any area around the Power Station. Yuk!

Others talk of Vauxhall as a sort of nascent Notting Hill. Have they ever been to Vauxhall, I wonder? Somehow I doubt it.

Even in areas such as Streatham and Brixton friends tell me the market is just as frenzied, with very ordinary flats attracting multiple bids over the asking price. (And those are asking prices that would have seemed absurd only a year or so ago.)

In Clapham extremely dull areas such as Abbeville Road have become hotspots just because (it seems to me) they've opened an over-priced, trendy new butcher on the street. I'd rather shoot myself than live in the anonymous streets around this area's 200 yard long oasis of uppish-market shops and restaurants.

More importantly, I just cannot see who will have the income to justify mortgages of over £1m to buy into the area. Especially once interest rates start climbing again.

Putney perhaps offers a few opportunities but the downsides include Nick Clegg as a resident and the appalling "poundlandesque' high street.

The house I sold on East Putney's Upper Richmond Road a few years ago has just gone back on the market at almost double our sale price, and six or seven times the price I originally paid. (And, by the way, it looks worse now than when I moved out!)

Wandsworth is basically already done-up and yet prices still keep going up. There's hardly a side-return, damp basement or mansard extension left to develop in the whole area. And if I see another set of Elephant's Breath painted plantation shutters I'll throw a brick through the window.

Back north of the river, West Kensington (or Baron's Court to the rest of us) seems to have discarded its itinerant residents as more and more people realise how close it is to Kensington proper. I paid under £20k for my first flat at Queen's Club Gardens. I'd need £500k+ for the same tiny top floor bolt hole now....and it still has no lift.

Now, I'm not the sort of publicity-seeking property commentator who drops the word 'bubble' at the first sign of a few homes being sold but even I think things are getting out of hand.

I've lived in London for 40 years, and owned a variety of properties across numerous parts of SW London. But I now feel priced out of the market both as a small-time developer and, more importantly, as a resident.

I reckon I'd need to be earning (at the age of 35) at least £300k a year to live the way I did in the 1980s, and afford the property we bought back then. (Especially if interest rates today were as high as they were then.)

About the only place I can afford to buy now is Pauper Place. Wherever that is.




* Fulham asking prices are apparently up 18% year on year. And you still think I'm being OTT?

£10,000 a square foot? Sounds reasonable to me.

A flat at One Hyde Park has apparently sold for around £140m, a price equal to about £10,000 per square foot.

It seems insane. But is it?

After all, it's almost certainly a very, very nice apartment. (The Candy brothers have an unerring eye for spaces that suit the aspirations of the super-rich, and there aren't many buildings by the legendary Lord Rogers that you can actually buy a flat in.)

It's slap bang in the middle of what is arguably the world's most desirable place to own a property. (Disregard those cynics who say the building overlooks a noisy road junction.)

And, of course, it's really not so crazy when you consider how much an Oligarch or Sheik will happily shell out for a yacht that starts losing value the moment it hits the water.

No, in a mad, mad world it's not such a daft price.

Of course for the likes of you and I (assuming my readership demographics haven't taken a dramatic upward swing) it's still absolutely bonkers. But so is spending £1m or so on a Bugatti Veyron, or £100m on a Francis Bacon triptych.

It's silly money. Like a kind of super-sized game of Monopoly

A few minutes along the road from the billionaire housing estate known as One Hyde Park, we are in the midst of renovating (more accurately, rebuilding) a sweet little cottage in a charming road off Kensington High Street.

By any normal standards Abingdon Road is also expensive. Current asking prices on the street are in excess of £2000 per square foot. Which is at the very top-end of Prime Central prices.

As the eagle eyed mathematicians among you will have noticed, however, this is dirt cheap compared to a 12"x12" patch of Candy coated construction.

So why the vast differential? Why is one worth FIVE TIMES as much as the other?

Buggered if I know.

Houses on Abingdon do of course lack several features that come as standard at One Hyde Park.

There are no smartly dressed, headset-equipped ex-SAS squaddies holding open the door for you. The Mandarin Oriental does not offer room service. There is no underground car park in which to store your fleet of blacked out limos. Harvey Nichols make-up department is not just across the road. And it's a bit of a slog to the nearest McLaren car dealership.

These disadvantages aside, though, Abingdon Road's not such a bad place to live.

Even though many of the houses are now worth a great deal of money (by the standards of us mere mortals), it still feels like London. It was built on a human scale. It has a sense of community. It's pretty. It's got two very good local restaurants (Kitchen W8 and The Abingdon). Waitrose is round the corner. Holland Park is across the road.

And at £2000 a square foot it's clearly a bit of a steal.

Perhaps with a bit of branding work, some canny international marketing and a few top-end connections into the Middle East and Eastern European elites we could raise this street's desirability levels.

It has to be worth the effort. After all, at £10,000 a square foot our little house would be valued at around £15m.

I'll take that.

The Doer-Upper Gossip Column......April

Further bite size chunks from the life of a small-time renovator in prime central. Not so much gossip as outpourings of ill-informed nonsense.


48 Hours in Barcelona

Many, many years ago I lived in Barcelona for a while.

I worked as an untrained and rather hopeless private English tutor (the untrained and hopeless bit seems to have been a common element in all my jobs) and met some interesting people.

There was the very wealthy couple I had conversation classes with each week who once took me to the city's most fashionable restaurant. The occasion was only spoilt by my extremely bad Spanish which resulted in me ordering, rather loudly, a roast prostitute!

One of my other students was an old school fascist and the Franco appointed boss of the City's port. His vast wood panelled office contained little sign of work but several large and elaborately framed photos of himself and the dictator. I always felt lucky to leave his office without being arrested for impersonating a teacher.

But, forgive me, this is a property blog. Not a history lesson. Where are the insights into the local market?

Well, I don't have many. Just one. I popped back recently for 48 hours to see an old friend, and it looks to me as though Barcelona is a busted flush.

Even this, the most prosperous of Spain's cities, is now a sad and disheartened casualty of the country's very painful recession.

The beggars look as though they used to be bankers and lawyers. The airport feels eerily quiet. The car parks are half empty. Trains carry almost as many buskers and hawkers as they do passengers. The people still working look far less well dressed than they did back in Franco's day. And everyone complains of rampant corruption in the government.

The nail in its coffin, for me, was the number of dreadful stag parties roaming the Ramblas and taking advantage of the cheap booze.

Of course, this probably means it's the perfect time to pick up a bargain at the estate agents. But only, I think, if you're prepared to stay in for the long haul. And I'm not.

Wood you credit it?

My wife gets immensely frustrated when we visit the Saatchi Gallery because my eyes are usually fixed on the floors rather than the walls.

I think Charles Saatchi's use of Dinesen Douglas Fir wide board flooring throughout his gallery is truly inspired. And I genuinely go just to drool over these majestic planks. (The art I am not so sure about.)

I have always wanted to install these amazing boards in one of our properties. But until now I've had neither the right property nor, I thought, a big enough budget.

This floor would be perfect in our W8 'wreck'. And much to my surprise it turns out my fellow ex-ad man is not the fool with his money that many seem to think.

At around £90m2, it may not exactly be a snip. But compared to the other floor I've always lusted after (which has the daft name of Lunar Larch), it's a veritable bargain. The Larch, you see, is an astonishing £163m2.

I once turned down the chance to work for Mr Saatchi, and I've always slightly regretted that decision.

I don't think I'll regret copying his choice of floor.


Merde! They said 'yes'.

In my previous blog piece, Le Bargain Hunter, I talked about a little place near St Tropez. Well, I eventually talked myself into making an offer (along with my old business partner, Murray).

And, after some negotiating about the conditions, it's been accepted.

In France this means the property is pretty much ours. Having signed a proposition d'achat, the sellers cannot consider another offer and we have until the end of April to sign proper contracts.

Given that our offer is a good 20% less than the property's original asking price, that's a result.

We've also managed to make it a condition of completion that we first get planning approval to redevelop and expand the property.

All sounds too good to be true....and I'm sure it is. This is France and ' le stuff ' happens. Watch this space.


Under Offer. And over the top?

On April 9th the BBC started broadcasting a fly-on-the-wall series about estate agents called Under Offer.

If you'd seen the trailers, you might have anticipated a bit of a roasting for the agents involved.

The excerpts shown didn't exactly seem to paint the profession in the most flattering light.

The programme itself turned out to be somewhat kinder than expected and a couple of the agents came out of it pretty well - especially the bright spark from Exeter called Lewis. (The guy from Birmingham was the only particularly unpleasant character.)

What's surprising is that Ed Mead, the much admired head honcho at Douglas & Gordon, agreed to be involved. I know this to my cost as he asked me to take part in a bit of filming.

The trailer for next week's episode showed our doer-upper in Egerton Gardens....where I had been filmed discussing how one room could be worth £1m.

Ed is one of the main, featured agents in the series and I do hope he comes out of this looking the genuine, intelligent, honest broker that he is.

For myself, of course, I just hope I don't appear at all.


Box Sash Rip-Off

We had a quote the other day to replace a few windows at the 'Wreck'. It's a small house. Not many windows. Three box sash, two or three very small French windows and a couple of tiny ordinary ones. £16,000 the quote said. Plus VAT.

Now, I don't know whether these idiots live in some kind of La La Land populated only with Oligarchs, Bankers and Premier League footballers...but this price came close to giving me coronary event of terminal proportions.

Frankly I'd rather spend several weeks renovating the existing windows myself than hand this bunch one single penny.

They may make brilliant windows, they may offer an unrivalled service, they may even offer me a thousand year guarantee...but even I can see when someone is taking the p***.


We want your business. But only if you'll wait 15 weeks.

Talking of windows, we had hoped to install a huge,very stylish, steel framed assembly to the back of the house as a refreshing change from the predictable 'sliding-folding whatsits'.

The trouble is there are really only two companies who make these (Clements and Crittall), so they're about as keen as whatever the opposite of mustard is. They don't need the business.

We were quoted up to 15 weeks delivery time.

That's a joke. These things are manufactured out of steel on a machine, not carved out of solid stone by artists. So why the hell don't they hire some more people, put on a night shift or invest in more kit and cut delivery times to something reasonable.

That's what they'd do in China or India or even the USA. But no, here in the UK, they can't be bothered.

Well, guys, I can't be bothered to wait. Someone else will be getting our business.

The Doer-Upper becomes Le Bargain Hunter.

Le Sporting is an unassuming little cafe on St Tropez's famous Place des Lices.

Even at this time of the year it's packed from breakfast through to dinner, mainly with locals.

Pushing my way through the crowded smokers terrace at 7.30 in the morning I felt lucky to get a table, a coffee and a chance to read the paper in the warm.

What I didn't feel so happy about was the bill. €4.90 for a cafe au lait.

Even the grossly over priced Gail's (or any of London's top end cafe chains) wouldn't dare charge that.

At these prices, I wonder how the French can afford to live. Except of course that these are not your typical French. These are the tradesmen, shopkeepers, notaires, vignerons and local landowners who have got rich on the back of a once booming local property market.

Across the Place is a large branch of Credit Agricole where some of those sipping their small espressos around me probably have credit balances running into millions.

Others around me are looking somewhat less content. The estate agents in particular.

For them, the last couple of years have been unusually lean.

Monsieur Hollande and the Eurozone financial mess have combined to make a second home in Saint Tropez a luxury few can justify.

Buying the house is one thing, owning it is another.

There are myriad local and national taxes, astonishingly high building renovation costs, daft hourly rates for gardeners, cleaners and maintenance workers and frighteningly authoritarian government powers.

(If you think I joke about French government powers, procure a copy of British Airways' High Life. In this month's issue John Simpson recounts how five police kitted out in riot gear took a battering ram to the front door to his Paris flat when he owed the local mairie €220.)

Homes from €1m up to €10m where people need finance have been hardest hit. Getting a French mortgage was always incredibly difficult, now it's almost impossible. The amount of paperwork you need to supply beggars belief, and the hoops you need to jump through would test an Olympic athlete.

As a result, I've never seen local agents with so many houses on their books (in stark contrast to those around me in Chelsea).

That MUST mean there are bargains to be had. And that's why I'm here, in an almost closed up town in the cold and wet.

I spotted what looked a good opportunity online, asked my trusty ex-business partner Murray to take a quick peek and then, on his say so, headed down to check it out myself.

It's a truly horrible house. Very small at around 84 m2. Derelict really. Neither old enough to have any character, nor recent enough to have been well built.

The problems don't end there. It's in an 'agricultural zone' so you can only add 30% to its size. There's a busy road only 300 yards away. And most of the one acre garden is in fact a working vineyard (I don't drink).

So why would anyone fly the best part of 1000 miles, then drive for 90 minutes and check into a shockingly grotty hotel in a dark, empty town for the sake of seeing this clearly useless property.

Because it's a bargain. And you don't get bargains in St Tropez. Or, you didn't.

For all its downsides, the property is a mere 3 minutes from one of the most fashionable beaches in the world - Pampelonne. Le Club 55 is just down the road. It is a hop, skip and jump to the beautiful, unspoilt hill town of Ramatuelle. And it is in an area that, come summer, will be at the hub of a multi-millionaires' playground.

The busy road at the bottom of its drive is the Route des Plages, a beautiful, snaking, undulating, umbrella pine lined road off which little tracks lead down through thickets of bamboo to the 5km long beach.

Johnny Hallyday, the naughty boy French version of Cliff Richard, lives a few hundred yards across the fields behind high gates to keep out le riff raff. Across the road, there's the grand holiday home of a once famous fashion photographer and his ex-model wife. And hidden away on single file back roads only traversed by locals, the lavish homes of bankers, northern european royals and assorted cashed-out business folk are pampered and primped like the spoilt offspring of Oligarchs.

To buy even the most unattractive property on an acre of land in this area for under €1m would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago. Indeed, this property first went on the market well over a year ago and at well over that price.

Now the owner has reduced his expectations by around 15%, and is unlikely to get even that.

Buying it is an exciting if daunting prospect, and I leave Saint Tropez with a sketch book full of ideas and a detailed renovation costing from Murray.

For less than £1m we could end up with a small but beautiful 3 or 4 bedroom house with a pool set amidst the vines in one of the most desirable locations on the Med.

BUT, and it's a very big 'but', as my plane bumps and judders its way back up towards Heathrow, I can't help wondering whether I can actually face the personal turbulence of owning another property in France.

The never-ending bureaucracy, the taxes, the unfriendly neighbours, the slow grind of the planning process, the arrogance of their building trades,the uncertainty of their property market and the €4.90 cafe au laits.

Le Petite Vigne, as Murray and I have named the property, might appear, on paper, to be a bargain. But is it really a bargain if it comes with a lot of problems?

Back in London the talk is of bubbles not bargains.

In a frenzied market where desperate young people are over-paying for everything, my chances of buying an investment property to do up are remote. (Even with one of the best buying agents on my side.)

And our six month personal search for a retreat in Somerset has only turned up lots of over-priced characterless shoe boxes.

So, what do I do? Write a piece for the blog, of course.

The Doer-Upper Gossip Column....February.

I don't always have a soap-box to jump on or a disaster to report on. So, new for 2014, here's my first irregular Gossip Column:

Bloody Neighbours

We are about to start work renovating 'Wrecksville W8' and in preparation we had the front garden cleared by a terrific bloke called Andy McCormack who I found on Rated People.

As he was busy stripping out various overgrown plants in the pouring rain, the neighbouring front door opened and the elderly resident (she's actually Lady somebody or other) poked her head out. Most of us might have expected her to offer this hardworking, self-employed and rather wet gardener a cup of tea.

Not this little old Daily Mail reader. She simply shouted "Bloody Foreigners" and then slammed shut the door again.

Fortunately, being more English than most of us, Andy took no offence. (He did suggest, however, that the next time I visited the house I should take my passport with me.)

I'm now rather worried how she'll react when there's a whole troupe of Polish builders on site in a couple of weeks time.

Blame the agents

I have an American friend who lives in Streatham. Strangely, he seems to like it.

Anyway, he and his new wife are keen to add to what I call their local buy-to-let property portfolio ( a slightly pretentious description of their 3 flats).

Such is the demand in this unassuming part of London, however, that he's having trouble buying anything. One bedroom flats are going to sealed bids the day they come to market. And then selling for unheard of prices.

Last week in his frustration he wrote to say "estate agents are now charging crazy prices."

The phrasing of this is interesting in that it assumes that agents just make up the prices. And I wonder how many others blame the agents for driving the rise in prices.

Even a drop-out from economics studies like myself understands that it's the market not the sellers that determines prices. But such is our national distaste for the role of the agent that we're happy to blame them for anything and everything. Including a housing market 'bubble'.

If it wasn't for the fact that their commissions keep getting fatter, I could almost feel sorry for them.

Somerset, the level-headed approach

For about six months now we've been looking for a small place to buy in Somerset.

The fact that this county has recently become a very large inland lake is a bit of a worry. And, to be honest, has rather put me off the idea.

So I emailed a friend who already has a house there and asked if his property was affected.

His reply was as follows: "we resisted buying in any area with the words 'levels' , 'lower' , 'under' , 'bottom' , 'brook', 'mill'  or 'lake' in the address."

Sensible man. Brilliant answer.


France Calling

As readers of this blog and my Tweets will know, I have a love/hate relationship with France.

We have owned 5 properties there and done well out of them both financially and in terms of lifestyle.

The country is fine, the problem is the French themselves. Many are lazy or unpleasant or just deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of Anglo-Saxon enterprise. Their taxes are onerous and spiteful. Their paperwork ridiculous and antiquated. Their rules and regulations unfathomable.

These days even their food is often below the standards of a decent English country pub.

Because of this, I swore we'd never return.

But, in truth, I love Saint Tropez and its surrounding area. Especially when it's not August and not packed with the chavs and chav-nots of Greater Europe.

Out of peak season it's a quaint town, with quiet, unspoilt beaches. Rural but sophisticated. Developed but not over-built (unlike the Cannes end of the coast).

So, when I saw a tiny little place right at the heart of its beaches priced at what looked like 'le snip' my resistance melted.

Ok, so it's only 1000 sq ft and close to a busy road. Ok, so it comes with an acre of vineyard (and I don't drink). OK, so I can't afford it and there's lots of work to do.

But if I let my head rule my heart, I'd never buy anything.

Whether we'll actually buy it or not, I don't know. But I think it's proved that I don't really want to live in the wetlands of SW England.

Property Doctor

On Saturday I'm due to take a look at a west London property owned by a GP practice. The doctors are thinking of retiring early....and they can afford to because years ago they bought the freehold of the building in which they have a surgery.

The floors above the surgery they have always rented out as flats, but they're now thinking of redeveloping the whole building and selling off the flats one by one.

After owning it for about 20 years, it could prove to have been the ideal (if accidental) pension plan.

They've already calculated that they could earn more from redeveloping the property than they have in their entire GP careers.

I'm not sure whether this implies we undervalue GPs. Or over value property.


Location, Location, Square Footage

I don't remember ever knowing the square footage of the first few houses we bought.

The one in Putney was a pretty big semi, the one in Fulham was sort of standard size terraced, and my flat in Queen's Club Gardens was the size a one bedroom flat should be.

We bought them because we fell in love with them, the price was sort of right and they were where we wanted to live. It would never have crossed my mind to check the price per square foot.

Now, it seems to me, that's all changed.

Agents have taken property and turned it into a mathematical equation rather than an emotional judgement.

We're all obsessed with pushing out every wall, roof and basement to create more of the most valuable thing in London - square footage.

And property viewers are as likely to turn up with a calculator as they are a colour chart.

I understand why its gone this way, and I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to checking the value of a property.

But it's still a shame, somehow.

It is perhaps the most telling example of how property has become an investment first, and a home second.

We interrupt this Blog for a New Year Party Political Broadcast.

As the nation's property big guns heralded New Year with a glass of vintage champers at their country estates, we were sipping lukewarm still water roughly 35,000 feet above Siberia on the way to Hong Kong.

The ever-so British pilot did at some point say that it was 10 seconds to midnight in the UK, and unenthusiastically proceeded to countdown to New Year. But most of the HK Chinese asleep around me couldn't have cared less. And it did seem rather pointless given it was already well into 2014 below us in the icy steppes.

Our annual visit to my stepson (and property partner) began with an evening trip across to Kowloon on the Star Ferry. This is the perfect introduction to the city. You are on a rusting, bobbing piece of traditional old HK looking at a vividly illuminated and utterly breathtaking futuristic skyline that makes New York look positively dowdy.

It's an intoxicating view and sitting there on the ferry's aged wooden benches you can almost feel the pulsating energy of the city's economy reflected in the evening light show.

This is an island city where, hemmed in by sea and hills, the ever higher buildings are both necessary and a potent symbol of Hong Kong's ambition.

For a number of years, property prices have been climbing even higher than the towers. Recently, however, things have gone decidedly flat in the local market.

Last time I was in our old colony, the Beijing controlled local government suddenly imposed a massive hike in property taxes. This was designed to cool a feverish market and its certainly done that.

Sales have fallen off a cliff, over 1000 estate agents have lost their jobs and dozens of EA offices have closed.

Prices don't seem to have fallen much, but buyer interest has. A beautiful penthouse we know in an good part of the Western District has had just one viewing in the 3 months since it hit the market. A year ago it might well have sold within days.

If the imposition of higher taxes can have this effect in a dynamic market like HK, just think what they could do in the more fragile environment of London - where the recovery is patchy and markets are hyper-sensitive.

As we all know, further proposed property taxes threaten London's top end market. And when the top end comes under pressure there's a top-down effect across the entire city.

I have a rich friend (well, I like to call anyone rich a friend, don't you) who is just about to put his £15m London house on the market. Not because he particularly wants to sell. Not even because he actually needs the money. No, it's because, like most of us, he hates paying tax.

He's selling up because he's worried about the threatened Mansion Tax.

In France, where he has another beautiful house, he already faces annual wealth taxes. Add an extra confiscatory tax to his London property and life really does become tougher. Even for those nibbling at the foot of the Rich List.

It seems that wherever you look governments are tapping the property owning rich to help paper over their own continuing mismanagement of the economy.

That's not just unfair, it's potentially disastrous.

In France, of course, it would be par for the course. They have a pathological loathing of anyone with money and, as a result, have an increasingly weak, and largely state-based economy.

In Britain, however, I like to think we have a more grown-up attitude to the role of government and the value of wealth-creating individuals.

I have lived in London for about 40 years, and while the place has undoubtedly got richer in that time it's certainly not as a result of government spending.

Indeed the bits that our taxes pay for like schools, hospitals, roads and public transport seem to have made little or no progress. If anything, they are arguably far worse.

What's made our city richer has been the massive influx of other nationalities, a tax environment that has encouraged us to create jobs and wealth and, in the 80s, the liberalisation of financial regulation that enabled the City to become a global powerhouse.

When I first arrived here, the only people it was hard to understand turned out to be Australians living in Earl's Court bedsitters.

Today, I can probably overhear a dozen different languages just walking to the corner shop. (And no, for those who know me, the corner shop I'm thinking of isn't Harrods.)

If I'm honest, this can be a bit disconcerting, but overall it's a wonderful compliment to us that so many people from all over the world want to come to our city. Either to spend money, or make it.

Unlike Hong Kong, our attraction isn't the presence of a nearby emerging superpower like China, it's much more subtle and much easier to destroy.

While the HK property market may take a battering for a while, it will survive because people who want to trade with China have to be there.

People don't have to be in London.

They are here because they choose to be in a country that respects the endeavours and aspirations of people seeking to improve their position, and doesn't overly penalise those who've 'made it'.

I may, these days, have a slightly posher accent and live in Chelsea but my mother was a cleaner for many years and my father a worker who never earned more than £20 a week in his life.

Nobody stopped me moving out of my background. It was actually easy. In London, even 40 years ago, I could be anything I wanted.

That's what I loved, and still love, about the place.

And it's this largely intangible appeal of our remarkable capital that could be so quickly derailed by the populist posturing of a Vince Cable (or, for that matter, the barking banter of Boris Johnson).

I'll give you a couple of examples:

Just 100 yards from a flat we recently sold, a Saudi royal family owns a large house and several flats. When they're in town, they employ 5 drivers on permanent standby. They also employ cleaners, caterers, gardeners, builders and many others. They don't work themselves, of course, so they go shopping or go to restaurants.

In other words, they pour money into the London economy. Vast quantities of it. The benefits of this far outweigh any that might be gained from imposing some nasty, spiteful Mansion Tax. Especially since the tax might curtail or even end their visits.

Bye bye jobs. Hello, lots more benefit claimants. How sensible is that?

At the other end of the spectrum, we have employed the same cleaner for the last 13 years. She arrived as a young Polish woman. She had a husband and a young child, but left them behind in her home country to try to make a better life for them here. Thanks to London and her sacrifice, she has slowly built a far better life. The whole family now live here. They aren't rich, but they have a decent home, make reasonable money and have a future that's decidedly rosier than it was.

London gave Anna and her family that chance. And even though her somewhat guarded Polish attitude sometime irritates, I am proud that our city gave her that opportunity.

Confiscatory taxes on the rich don't just affect the rich. They also ultimately affect thousands like Anna. People who contribute far more to our economy than they ever take from government handouts. (Unlike the often lazy, benefit cheating English people we'd occasionally employed before.)

Anyway, enough of the political drum beating. You get the point, I hope.

Property taxes, for the rich or anyone else, are of course only a small element of the mix. But they can, as Hong Kongers will tell you, have a devastating effect.

In London, the ridiculous stamp duty structure has already dealt a heavy blow to the market over £2m. Any further tinkering could be utterly disastrous.

Immense wealth and abject poverty have always been a part of our city. And, in all the time I've been here, I have never seen any evidence that you can eradicate one by heavily taxing the other.

Quite the reverse, in fact.

An Open Letter to my so-called 'Buyer'.

Dear Sir,


Almost a month ago now you made an offer for our house in Abingdon Road, London W8.

It was a good offer, £2.2m in cash. You also agreed to exchange contracts within 5 working days of the papers being in order.

You did all the right things. A good firm of solicitors was appointed. You quickly nominated an overseas company to make the acquisition. And you were happy for our agent to talk to your Finance Director and confirm your company's status and intent.

The necessary papers were all quickly collated. Questions answered. Queries sorted.

The solicitors were ready to exchange. All they needed was you and your deposit money.

At this stage, even the profoundly cynical, like myself, might have believed things were on track for a successful and speedy conclusion.

Then you disappeared. Went off the radar. Didn't answer emails. Or phone calls.

Apparently you were in 'the States' for Thanksgiving. Couldn't be contacted.

That's strange. After all, you have offices in four countries and according to your website conduct offshore investments on behalf of international investors.

You should therefore, by now, have mastered the art of picking up a phone or tapping out an email. But seemingly not. You apparently have to be physically present in the London office to conduct business in London.

These days the euphemism for a delaying tactic is not "it's in the post", it's "he's travelling." And you have used this relentlessly.

Yesterday, for example, our agents received an email from you (finally) saying that you had "arrived from the US at 1pm and would be flying to Dublin at 9am in the morning". It's nice of you to keep us posted on your itinerary, but honestly don't bother. It's not remotely impressive or in any way an excuse.

(Just in case you were wondering, I'm travelling to Clapham for lunch today and will be heading to Mells in Somerset and then Bristol tomorrow morning.)

Your cash offer also seems to have morphed into a much less desirable deal requiring Lloyds Bank funding. This was casually dropped into a your recent email with hardly a comment, yet it's a fundamental change.

We aren't interested in your travel schedule, your financial arrangements or your internal approval systems. We are interested however in the fact that you have wasted my time, our agent's time, the time of two solicitors and caused all of us enormous frustration.

You are at the very least disingenuous, possibly a fantasist, but mostly just an arrogant bastard.

Your company is named after a famous cigarette brand (sadly not Marlboro, because the cowboy connection would be most appropriate). But dealing with you is far more dangerous to one's health than a few fags.

You had a chance to acquire a very rare, unmodernised W8 terraced house in a rising market. You messed up, and and we will now redevelop the property ourselves. Which is a shame for your clients.

We don't need to deal with rude, insincere buyers like yourself. And won't.

Yours faithfully

The Doer-Upper.