“posh ghost towers”
Oh, we have those in San diego.
Majority of London's newly built luxury flats are unsold, raising the spectre of "posh ghost towers"
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I strongly recommend the book.
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I see what you did there…
BTW, I could see this as the last residence of Donnie-Two-Bibles.
Impossible, you say? In this timeline, I’ll go with unlikely.
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Give it a couple of years and maybe real humans can afford to live in London again. Or am I being hopelessly optimist?
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A substantial number of mansions coming on the rental market will push the market rents downwards.
The UK has announced a registry of beneficial owners for properties owned by corporations, in an effort to fight against money laundering. They’ve been talking their sweet time, perhaps because of Brexit, but that would also help.
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Possible on paper. Depends on whether or not the developers decide it would be cheaper to demolish the buildings, rather than sell them at a loss to recoup some portion of the investment and get out of town.
I suppose a very important question is: do they have any significant structural defects that they were expecting to correct later, after the billionaires’ money started flowing around and they could afford to cover the fixes?
As a regular human trying to sell my property in London, the market is frustrating at the moment. I’m moving overseas and are having to decide between selling at a loss in a stagnated market or holding onto it for a year or two and seeing if things get better.
Even if Brexit is delayed or cancelled (unlikely) the impact has been huge.
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So - people are looking to short real estate now?
How? REITS? Builders stocks? Or just assuming they’ll be another banking crisis when real estate tanks and short them?
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You have to consider that outside EU there is nothing to stop Britain from going all out tax haven with no regulations. It’ll save the rich for a while longer, even if the rest of the country suffer.
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The article from Guardian this story is based on turns out to be a year old. Here is more recent news:
“Renewed interest from abroad has driven the price bump in inner London boroughs such as Camden and Westminster, where asking prices rose more than 5% in February.”
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If everyone knows the flats are just investment vehicles, does it follow that there are already market derivatives based on them?
If the material reality of the flats is only important because it keeps them scarce, why not run the whole thing as a virtual reality game or a cryptocurrency instead?
Would someone like Baudrillard tell us that market derivatives are already a kind of virtual reality?
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Are the English planning on completely destroying their nation? Between Brexit, a toxic housing market, and austerity, they seem bent on self destruction.
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Don’t forget turning the NHS into a for-profit system like they have in the US.
Anyway you’re all just jealous because no-one can fuck up a country like us Brits can, just ask India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Or Palestine. Or South Africa (concentration camps before they were cool). Or Kenya. Or etc…
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The city council and the mayor are both mentioning it. A lot. Doesn’t seem to be much movement on the issue though. We also need more restrictions on Air BnB, vacant luxary holdings are less attractive when you can instantly pull money out of them as short term tourist rentals.
Which also depends upon if the developers have enough other revenue to just sit on the properties, and didn’t take on too much debt themselves. Which is kind of what I am fearing is the case. The dominoes are wobbling…
Hoping it will turn out not all that bad for you, sir, but I am not all that hopeful.
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Oh no! 
The economy will tank because real estate value will collapse, as it did only 10 years ago! 
Quick, we must cut health care and social spending and start a new quantitative easing program for the super rich! 
You realised that this was sarcasm, right?
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@spetrovits it was the barbed wire on the roof of the Catholic church that never made me want to visit.
WTF!
Barbed wire on the roof even?
Seriously.
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Depending on what material the roof was made from, might it have been there to discourage copper thieves?
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Maybe London should consider a solution like Vancouver where they add additional tax on properties that have been unoccupied for a few months. This forces developers to lower prices to meet the market and discourages foreign real estate speculation.
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