We at CityMetric do our best to resist the urge to point and snort at every ridiculous London property listing we see. Partly this is because we’re a serious, grown up and professional news organisation; mostly, though, it’s because if we did that, we’d never have time to do anything else.
Sometimes, however, you just can’t help yourself. Here is an image of a “beautiful brand newly finished two bedroom house” [sic]. It’s in the highly sought after Kentish Town district of north London, just minutes from the greenery of Hampstead Heath and Tufnell Park tube.
It is also, one can’t help but notice, a small brick box that somebody’s stuck onto the side of an existing house.
Asking price: £1m.
Image: screenshot from Foxtons’ listing on RightMove.
It’s also not finished, by the way.
It’s easy to take these things as yet more evidence of a property market ascending into lunacy. On this occasion, though, we suspect that the price indicates nothing more than one particularly over-optimistic vendor.
Elsewhere in the same postcode, two-bed houses – end terraces, new build mews houses and so forth – are going for £600,000-£800,000. That’s a lot, but it’s a lot less than £1m, for properties that may have more going for them. Only one other two-bed is on at £1m, and that’s a chichi converted warehouse, not something that looks like a suburban garage from the 1980s.
All that said, a friend selling elsewhere in north London reports being told by an estate agent that his small one-bed flat would probably go for more than its £450k asking price to a rich family with no intention of living in it, purely because it’s in the catchment area of a particularly good local school. Things are crazy out there.
But possibly not one-million-pounds-for-a-granny-flat crazy.
