What a ghastly, nouveaux-riche abomination. Yes, the buyer will almost certainly be a Russion, Indian or Chinese ’international businessman’ with a highly dubious source of wealth.
The author has, as others have already pointed out, no clue of the fact that the higher end of the UK property market would crash if the money laundering laws were enforced.
‘Russian, Chinese and Indian buyers have scooped up huge estates in areas of north Surrey’. Tell me again about the strict money-laundering laws?! - no such thing, not in the U.K. Those rules only apply to the little people. Not even the poisoning of its own citizens has prompted the U.K. to curb Russian money laundering there.
It would be nice to see an article on properties in France , where you get a lot more for your money than in the oligarchy-inflated, over-priced UK.
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No one wants to die. But people do move to Surrey.
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As one who has lived in Surrey for over 50 years I can assure you that there are large numbers of people who have no hope of owning houses as described in the article. I bought my 1300 square foot terrace house for £6,500 which is now valued at £420,000. While £6,500 represented just over 3 times my salary I could afford it with a reasonable mortgage. Though I got several promotions and changed to much better paid employment even my salary before retirement would not have allowed me to buy this house. It seems this article is aimed at the very rich.
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RE: Most buyers hire a solicitor to represent them, which costs roughly 2,000 pounds ($2,600), but can vary, Ms. Geaves said. It is also becoming more common for buyers to hire acquisition agents to assist them, a service that costs about 2 percent of the sale price, she said.
Buyer's agents are the biggest boondoogle in world. One can do all the legwork on the internet and deal directly with the listing agent saving the 2%.
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@Reader In Wash, DC When buying in Toronto, we were advised by several family and friends that few sellers agents want to deal directly with a prospective buyer. It's hard to get a timely response or to book a viewing (as they have to show up instead of the buyer agent). Yes the seller agent has an obligation to respond to all potential buyers but they don't have to do it quickly or well. People we know who tried to do the work themselves found quickly that they got nowhere and had to get an agent. It's like an unspoken agreement among all real estate agents to collude to force people to hire and pay for selling and buying a home.
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@Reader In Wash, DC: For an overseas home purchase, especially at this price level, you'd have to be crazy NOT to use a buyer's agent. How much is your time worth? And peace of mind?
And then there's that pesky time-difference between USA & UK in terms of getting things done in a timely way.
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"There are no restrictions on foreign buyers in the United Kingdom, although they must comply with strict money-laundering laws"
This made me laugh. The U.K. is notorious for turning a blind eye to money-laundering through real estate. An obscene number of million-dollar homes in London are purchased by Russians and other foreigners, and are completely unoccupied year-round -- it's just a money-laundering scheme in plain sight. The real estate industry has no incentive to police itself, since it drives prices (and brokers' commissions) ever higher. Meanwhile, the main victims are actual Londoners who are priced out of the market and have to move to increasingly distant locations.
So I challenge the suggestion that these money-laundering laws are "strict" or "must be complied with" -- those claims are not credible.
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