London fuels million-pound property boom
TENS OF thousands more people became property millionaires in 2012, driven by healthy growth in London house prices.
The number of properties worth £1m climbed 47,024 over 2012, Zoopla.co.uk said yesterday, to hit 300,142 – a rise of 19 per cent in just a year.
Of this total, some 182,583 – or 64 per cent – are located in London, the property website calculates, and some 36,815 of these broke the £1m barrier in the last year. This means some 100 new property millionaires were created every day in the capital.
Out of all the London boroughs, Kensington and Chelsea wears the crown as the priciest, with an average house price of £1,514,490. Across the borough, some 44.9 per cent of residents live in houses worth over £1m, dwarfing the next most desirable borough, Westminster, where 28.2 per cent are property millionaires, and Hammersmith and Fulham, where property millionaires make up 21.3 per cent of residents.
The Kensington figures are pulled up by the most expensive street in the UK – Kensington Palace Gardens – home to both the country’s richest man Lakshmi Mittal, and the sixth wealthiest, Leonard Blavatnik.