1. Environmental
September 12, 2014

Today's London property bargain: the million pound granny flat

By Jonn Elledge

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.

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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.

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