Agent's average house price tops £1.2m this year

London West End estate agent LDG has reported that the average price of property it sold this year was £1.231m, up from £839,000 the previous year.

Laurence Glynne, partner at LDG, said the increased activity towards the higher end of the market had been this year’s major trend.

He said: “We believe that this is because finance to purchasers who would usually buy in the £350,000 to £750,000 price bracket has been much harder to obtain as the banks have restricted buy-to-let packages (which is slowly changing) and lending to first-time buyers, whereas wealthy buyers are still keen to purchase prime residential flats and houses.

“Our figures support this: the number of cash buyers is currently averaging at 64% (compared to 44% in 2009/2010), whilst financed transactions have accounted for 35%.
 
“The number of UK-based purchasers has increased from 48% to 70% year on year, whilst the number of EU purchasers increased from 11% to 17%: this is hardly surprising as the financial crisis in Europe has led to an increase in people wanting to invest their money in London rather than European markets.

“Interestingly, the number of purchasers from the rest of the world has gone down from 40% to 13% year on year. This may be because there was less new-build property, which tends to attract foreign investment, to purchase in the West End this year.”

He said that some of the prices his firm have achieved this year were records.

Glynne added: “The year ahead will continue to reflect the shortage of available flats and houses for sale, and as such, we expect prices to continue to steadily increase.”