Little Englanders and Tricky Trots: The only hot properties in town.

Its been a funny old summer. And I'm not just talking about the weather.

As the thermometer see-sawed, so too has my view of the property market.

One moment I think it's probably the best time in years to buy something. The next I worry that everything's on the point of collapse and I'd be better investing in a one way ticket to somewhere far removed from both the Brexiters and the Corbynistas.

Little Englanders and Tricky Trots dominate the political landscape and are busy exploiting a population now hooked on xenophobia, entitlement and blame.

That's not exactly an environment that encourages confidence in the future.

It's all a bit depressing. To say the least.

But where does it leave the property market? And, in particular, the Prime London market?

The so-called experts seem to be suffering from a particularly extreme form of schizophrenia.

One minute they tell us prices are tumbling across prime areas and nothing is selling. The next we are being told that the fall in the pound is spurring a new influx of cash rich overseas buyers looking for a bargain.

My guess is that neither view is entirely accurate. Or entirely false. It's just a bloody mess. And nobody really knows whether it's going to get even worse or gradually start to improve.

Which just leaves me feeling confused and wary.

Although I recently extolled the investment virtues of family homes in deeply middle-class areas just outside Prime London like Barnes, Kew and Putney, I can't help, even now, being pulled towards the parts of town I'd prefer to live in myself.

We've just started renting a place close to Chelsea Green that I think was built for The Borrowers. It's the smallest house I've ever lived in. Although a bit run down in parts, it is a perfect pied-a-terre (as the agents would say) for the few days each week we spend in town.

On one of these days I wandered past a small house in one of Chelsea's classic, colourfully painted little streets between the King's Road and the Green. It is perhaps the last house on the street still unmodernised, and a little flyer in the window announced that it was For Sale.

Bingo. Just what I was looking for. That's what I thought, anyway.

A visit with the agent confirmed everything I'd hoped for : you could extend this very grim and near derelict little place upwards and outwards, making a perfect small 3 bed 'cottage'.

It had been to 'best and final' bids before the Brexit vote. But one by one these buyers evaporated after the unexpectedly disastrous referendum result.

Given the state of the market and the property, an offer of maybe 10-15% below asking seemed a reasonable starting point. At that level, the numbers might just stack up.

The owner, however, refuses to even consider offers and is sticking with his original asking price.

At this level, the young agent explained, there is no upside for a 'developer'.  (This endearing, upfront honesty did not go unnoticed.)

To give you an idea of how unrealistic this seller is being...here's some numbers.

Just to break even on the project (after stamp duty, realistic renovation costs and, of course, the owner's silly asking price ) the 'done up' house would have to be worth about £3000 per square foot.

The market value for houses on this particular street, however, has rarely exceeded £2500 psf. Even at its peak. Even renovated to the highest possible level.

So, unless there's a Prime idiot wandering around, this house is dead in the water.

On the other side of Chelsea, close to the river, we visited a very different property. A rather grand 2,000 square foot mansion flat.

It is perfectly proportioned for a kind of living that seems long past. Wandering from room to room, I could imagine an Edwardian 'gentleman' of slightly rakish inclination dressing in faded black tie, taking an early snifter from a well-stocked trolley, calling the porter for a cab and then heading off into the night for dinner at his club.

It's not that everything is old and run-down. Far from it. The bathrooms are traditional but almost new and exquisitely fitted out. The kitchen has a vast, and hugely expensive, French range cooker. The wallpapers are a masterpiece of faux antiquity. The ornately framed pictures hint at an aristocratic pedigree.

At first glance, in fact, it's all highly seductive. Then reality kicks in.

The flat is actually all wrong. For today's market, at least.

It's on the ground floor with no view of the river across the road.

Most rooms look out onto a central core that's more Victorian workhouse than Edwardian glamour.

The living space is small by today's standards and not easily reconfigured.

Flats on the opposite side of the common parts benefit from being corner units with light from two sides and, from the first floor upwards, fabulous views of Albert Bridge and the river.

For these reasons, I think, the flat failed to find a buyer at its original asking price. (An apartment in the same building had quickly achieved almost twice this price because of its top floor views, its light filled rooms and a modern makeover.)

A couple of years ago, this flat would have been snapped up. It would have been a small developer's dream. Today, however, the few buyers there are will do the numbers, look at the negatives and move on to somewhere else.

Even with £500,000 off the original asking price, I doubt this place will easily find a buyer.

It's a shame. I'd be thrilled to try and bring either of these properties sensitively into the 21st Century.

Both are, in their way, London classics and what living in our city is all about.

The endless over-priced new builds may appeal to the lock-up and leave buyer or 'stack-up' for the buy-to-let investor. They may even suit a 'wealthy' first-time buyer.

But it is this older stock that makes London a uniquely attractive world city, and defines the capital's many 'villages'.

As the Corbynistas and Brexiters fight it out for who can take our country backwards fastest, I fear that prime London and properties like these are going nowhere soon.

And that leaves me going nowhere as well.

The Big Lemon: Letter from Amalfi.

Two days after the referendum result, we flew to the Amalfi coast to meet up with a couple who come from Hong Kong and Seattle.

As we tried to digest the chaos we'd left behind in the UK, their Asian and US perspectives were both invaluable and depressing.

To cut a long discussion short, they just couldn't believe the British people could be so short-sighted, so narrow-minded, so xenophobic.

They looked at us pityingly and, no doubt, felt sorry for us personally.

How awful is that? The world actually feels sorry for us.

Truth is, I also felt sorry for us.

In the 48 hours following the Brexit result, we withdrew an accepted offer on one property, and declined to participate in a 'best and final' bid for another.

It didn't seem like we had any choice.

As I sit on the terrace of our small and basic, but very hospitable, hotel looking out across laden lemon trees to the glamorous speed boats buzzing up and down this beautiful coast, London seems a place to forget.

A place that's had its day in the sun and is now fading fast.

I hope that's not true, but fear that it may be the outcome of our isolationism and pig-headedness.

Like many, we're battening down the hatches. Renting rather than buying. Hoping that this mistake isn't as bad as it seems. Wishing that the bitter resentments of certain sectors of our country hadn't defeated the vitality, optimism and ambition of our youth and many of our immigrants.

As yet another over-sized lemon drops onto the terrace tiles, it seems there is only one way to describe London today : The Big Lemon.

In for a penny......

Oh no! It's finally referendum day. Decision time.

Nobody with a brain above their shoulders wants to be even partially controlled by some ageing bureaucrat from Luxembourg sitting, oh so comfortably, in his Brussels lair.

But on the other hand, nobody can deny that we are Europeans, that we have enjoyed the fruits of a common market and that we have far more in common with a hard working German than a bible belt American with an automatic rifle.

Coming to some sort of decision, therefore, is more than a bit testing for the old brain cells, as Wooster would have said to Jeeves.

But, rain notwithstanding, a decision must be made. Votes cast. An X plopped in the appropriate box.

I don't like Brussels anymore than dear old Nige, but I do like Europe.

I feel more at home in France, frankly, than in The Lake District. And far more content in Barcelona than somewhere like Glasgow.

My daughter just spent a year working in Paris, my son worked in Austria for a couple of years; their horizons are way beyond the little channel 'Leavers' seem to set so much store by.

I'm pleased to see that our children simply don't recognise borders in the same way we used to. And nor should they if we ever want the world to be a better, safer place.

So I'm in.

I hope most of you are too.

Letting themselves down.

We are between homes in London.

Truth is we are unsure what to do next. And as the weeks slip relentlessly by and we need to move from the temporary flat borrowed from my stepson, I am beginning to panic.

Although we've had an offer accepted on a new doer-upper (more on this another time), we won't have sealed the deal in time to move directly into it.

We could just move to Somerset for the summer, but for numerous reasons that doesn't quite work. We and my daughter, newly returned from Uni, need a base in town.

A rental is probably the answer.

But should it be an Airbnb for a month or so? Or a proper rental for 6 months or so?

Unlike everyone I've ever met, I absolutely hate the Airbnb website. OK so it's clean and neat and nice....but it seems such a random tool. I don't feel at home with its search system. It's just as likely to send me a one bed new build in Hackney as it is a two bed garden flat in Kensington.

No, sorry Airbnb, you may be cool, but you just don't cut it with me.

So we turned to conventional agents. First I contacted a Chelsea agency who we've worked with before. Their lettings team acted incredibly quickly and, on the face of it, were really, really on the ball.

The trouble was the agent they sent us out on viewings with was so oily in his sycophancy I was worried for the environment.

Where do these people learn this kind of behaviour? Is there a school called The Academy of Grovelling Creepiness?

In the end I just didn't believe anything he said, and the intensity of the pressure he applied on us to take one (very nice) flat was just too much.

It almost put us off the whole idea of renting, frankly.

Next we decided to try Barnes, close to the area we hope to buy in. I contacted one of the larger independents in the village and gave them a specific brief. 2 beds. Outside space. Must accept a dog. Preferably in what agents call 'Little Chelsea' off White Hart Lane.

Within a few hours an email pinged up saying the agent had attached several properties for our consideration. The trouble was there was no attachment.

I emailed back asking for the attachment. No response. Nothing. For 24 hours nothing. So I call and leave a message.

Finally another email pings up, this time with the promised attachments but no apology.

All the properties were 3 instead of 2 beds and significantly over the budget I had given them.

So I email back again. Nothing. 24 hours later and still no response. I give up.

I really like the sales teams at most agents I've worked with, but there seems to be something about the lettings market that attracts a very different breed. If the sales department is Waitrose, lettings is often more like Tesco Local.

Licking my wounds in the country.

I love doing up properties.

Seeing a tired, neglected and badly configured space transform into something desirable, comfortable and usable is immensely satisfying.

Of course there are always going to be problems - disputes with builders, unexpected expenses, inefficient suppliers, jobsworth planners, chippy tradesmen, unnecessary delays - but these bumps in the road are nothing to the pleasure of seeing a finished project.

I remember coming downstairs day after day at our Putney house and marvelling at the vast opened up space, the beautifully engineered Bulthaup kitchen and the sheer luxury of it (by my standards, anyway).

The same was true when we transformed a dull, dark beach-front apartment in St Tropez, a crumbling villa in the Var vineyards, a neglected semi in Fulham and a tiny garret in Paris. Each one has left a deep impression on me.

More recently, of course, there's been the flat in Egerton Gardens (recently marketed as London's most expensive studio flat) and the little house in Kensington.

I don't think I can ever completely give up this part of my life. But whether it's still a viable way to make some kind of a living is another question entirely.

Not only has the smug draper's son, our friend Mr Osborne, turned into a modern-day Sheriff of Nottingham with his unwarranted tax raids, but prices across the board in London do seem out of kilter with real incomes.

When very ordinary, small Fulham houses are over £2m and deeply unattractive flats south of the river are £1m, it's not just me that's priced out of the market. It's most people. Even very successful people.

All things considered, therefore, I'm taking a bit of a step back. Still looking at the market. Still keeping

an eye on what's out there. But rushing into nothing. And focussing instead on the work we need to do at our house in Somerset.

We have a lot to do. Both inside and out.

The house is currently very top heavy. All bedrooms and little living space. So we need to knock through a couple of walls. Take out one of the staircases. Put in some new windows. Fit a new kitchen. Revamp a boot room, guest loo and a bathroom. And completely rethink a small lower ground floor room that's destined eventually to be my 'study'.

Outside we need to move a 2000 litre oil tank, scrap a second tank, dig trenches for new oil pipes, complete a new 'mediterranean' garden on a terrace, manage a 3/4 acre walled garden we now rent and lay about 50 metres of brick paved paths.

All of this needs to be done while thinking up ways in which I can earn some money to be able to afford it all.

And on that note, I think I need a little lie down....

Sold. (Down the river?)

I should be celebrating. I should be over the moon. We finally sold the little house in Kensington.

So why are we less than jubilant, feeling only relief?

Well, it's taken forever to sell the house and required some pretty dramatic price drops to get a deal done. That's why.

By my reckoning, the state of the market has cost me at least £250,000. (And that's just me. I only own half the property.)

I'm not basing that figure on an aggressive initial price expectation. Indeed, I've allowed quite a decent discount to the original asking price in my calculations.

So you can see why I'm not exactly popping the Bolly (apart from the fact that I don't drink).

We haven't lost money. We've actually made a reasonable, if smaller than expected, return. Deduct the opportunity cost however and we probably move into negative territory. All thanks to George Osborne and his new confiscatory SDLT rates.

Fortunately we bought very well, poured money into rebuilding a near derelict but ultimately very pretty property and put enormous effort into the project.

In doing so we risked a very large proportion of a lifetime's accumulated pennies only to have these savings threatened and ultimately diminished by a smug draper's son.

Forgive me if I sound more than usually bitter. Actually I don't care whether you forgive me or not. I think I have every reason to feel the way I do.

The current inhabitant of 11 Downing Street has proved an arch exponent of knee-jerk political expediency.

In one sound-bite-friendly tax change he single-handedly brought chaos to the £2m+ end of the London property market. All because he was afraid that a much less onerous Labour 'mansion tax' would sweep him out of office.

He has gone on to compound this by strangling the buy-to-let market with more new taxes.

The end result of all this: the complete opposite of everything he was supposedly trying to do.

Prices for young first time buyers have continued to soar. Rental property is becoming harder to find and more expensive. And the world's wealthiest are opting to put their money anywhere other than London.

For the sake of a few votes, Osborne has chopped London off at the knees. Thanks George.

Can't wait for today's Budget.

If tax doesn't kill the market, red tape will.

As the rather derisory offer for our house stutters somewhat lifelessly towards a still very unpredictable conclusion, it's no longer Osborne's rip-off tax-take that's likely to kill it. It's the unbelievable volume of red tape.

Like most things, property has become mired in a bog of meaningless paperwork designed, apparently, to protect a feckless population from its own common sense.

Obtaining a mortgage is now a Kafkaesque farce (or should that be nightmare). Even successful city types with bonus-pots to die for face a wall of inane enquiries utterly irrelevant to their ability to maintain the monthly repayments. These are people who on a daily basis probably invest multiple millions, but are not trusted to know their own position well enough to borrow even a relatively small percentage of a property's value.

Things may have been in need of a slight tightening after the 'crash', but this is murderous strangulation.

When it comes to the property itself, the level of paperwork sought by ever more zealous lawyers is bordering on the insane.

I would not be in the least surprised to be asked to guarantee my buyer's happiness in the house.

Asked for a warranty on the whole heating system (bear in mind that this is a small, two bed house) I simply replied - yes, I guarantee that it has one.

I've heard of insulating a property, but now it seems the buyer must be insulated too - from every known risk, every known potential problem, every known unknowable.

We have supplied planning permissions, building regs certification, electrical safety certification, gas safety certification....and still the requirements keep coming in.

"Did you have Conservation Area permission to replace the roof?". Well, you pointless box-ticking robot, I've given you a 10 year roof guarantee and, if we hadn't replaced it, the thing would probably have collapsed on your buyer's head. So, what would you prefer? I bit of A4 paper, or a rather beautiful new roof?

In truth, our transaction is not remotely complex or fraught with too many problems. There is absolutely nothing that a conversation face-to-face between myself and the buyer could not iron out.

But no, that's simply not the 'done thing'. So we'll keep bouncing bits of digital paperwork around the global servers of Google until some sort of conclusion is finally reached.

What that will be I have absolutely no idea. And it certainly doesn't come with a guarantee.