Princesses, stamp duty and the rising tide of indoor swimming pools: The Billionaires’ Row estate agent talks to City A.M. about the changing times on London’s priciest street
If anywhere is on the front line in the current struggle to sell London’s high-end property, it is The Bishops Avenue, the fabled Billionaires’ Row just north of Hampstead Heath; and if anyone is leading the fight, it is Trevor Abrahmsohn, the area’s legendary estate agent.
Through his Glentree agency, Abrahmsohn has over the years sold many of the 66 mega-mansions which line the curving boulevard, typically for prices in the tens of millions, so it is not surprising that he has strong feelings about the slowdown in prime property sales over the last year, which is now affecting the capital from Canary Wharf in the east to Richmond in the west.
And there is a particular butt of his criticism: stamp duty.
During a personal tour of The Bishops Avenue he laid much of the blame for the current decline in sales on the stamp duty increases brought in by George Osborne when Chancellor of the Exchequer – so joining a growing chorus of voices calling for the tax to be scaled back.
“Stamp duty has knocked our transactions down by seventy per cent. People are just not moving, that’s the problem,” he says.
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Abrahmsohn went on: “We are losing a lot of American wealth-creators who are going home. Eighty per cent of my American pals have left.”
The Bishops Avenue itself, it has to be said, was showing signs that not all is well in the property market, on the morning I visited.
Numerous large For Sale signs line the thoroughfare. It also feels rather empty.
In the half-hour before I meet Trevor, only a sole jogger passes me by, while near our appointed rendezvous, rusty chains lock a gate enclosing a house which appears to be decaying – there is a broken fountain and shrubs climbing above the ground floor window.
The For Sale sign is the only thing that looks polished.
Yet with his effortless patter, when Abhahmsohn arrives he manages to put some of the glamour back into Billionaire’s Row, as he drives me up and down in his dinky smart car (it seems odd that he owns a vehicle that prides itself on compactness when the houses he sells do just the opposite).
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“That one belongs to a princess,” he murmurs.
Which princess, I ask.
One of them, he smiles. Few streets have a princess, but Bishops Avenue has a few, it seems. And he continues:
“That one belonged to the Sultan of Brunei.”
“I partied with Gorbachev in that one.”
“That one was recently rented by Justin Timberlake. Or was it Justin Bieber?” (It was Bieber).
At the end of the road is a house once owned by Aristos Constantinou, a Greek fashion tycoon gunned down there in 1985.
That death must have made it a hard sale, I say.
Trevor shrugs. “I sold it with a bullet still in the wall.”
The mega-rich are filling in their outdoor pools and replacing them with indoor ones (Source: Getty)
In another sign of the changing times, Abrahmsohn says that ultra-wealthy home owners are falling out of love with outdoor swimming pools, and in some cases, filling them in.
“We saw a growth of pools in the mid-1970s, when everyone wanted one,” he says.
“But with the British weather being as it usually is, and the influx of international money, many of these outdoor pools are now actually being refilled with earth as if they were never there.”
He explained: “The demise of these outdoor pools follows the trend of international buyers wanting a quasi-small hotel.
“They stay at hotels, so they want hotel-type houses. They want their hairdressers there, their cigar rooms there, they want their wine cellar, their classic car selection, their squash court, their indoor swimming pools and wellness clinics.”
We then walk into a large house which is on sale for £18m. (It used to belong to Richard Desmond, the publisher and former owner of the Daily Express.)
The former home of erstwhile Daily Express proprietor Richard Desmond is on the market for £18m (Source: Getty)
The rooms are largely bright white and empty, apart from plasma-screen TV’s in nearly every one; there is a gold-plated lift to the upper floors, while in the basement is the swimming pool.
At the far side of the pool is the gym, the massage room, the sauna and the spa. And just before we leave the basement, we pop our heads into the cinema. “You can’t have a house like this,” says Trevor, “without having a cinema.”