A luxury apartment in what was once the Rolls-Royce headquarters in Mayfair has been sold to a ‘young international’ buyer for £26.25 million in an otherwise sluggish London prime property market.
This latest luxury property to sell comes as a new wealth survey by Beauchamp Estates revealed sales of properties of more that £15 million dipped in 2024.
The survey found London’s ultra-prime property market fell by 25 per cent in the number of sales and 34 per cent in the value of properties sold in 2024. In 2024, there were only 40 sales of properties worth more than £15 million, totalling £856.5 million. In contrast, 2023 had 54 sales worth £1.3 billion.
While the Rolls-Royce sale seems to go against the main trend observed by Beauchamp’s survey, it also highlights other findings from the report.
The luxury apartment in Mayfair’s Old Park Lane went from being a part of the Rolls-Royce London headquarters to an opulent 5,222 sq.ft lateral residence bought by a ‘young international buyer’, equity investors Fairway Capital, who are behind the deal, said.
The Edwardian building was built in 1904 by the architect behind the Savoy Hotel, Thomas Edward Colcutt, and served between 1906 and 1971 as the luxury motoring brand’s London pied-à-terre. Developers Leconfield Property Group turned it into a palatial four-bedroom apartment, with reception halls, high ceilings and unrivalled park views.
Trends in London’s 2024 prime property sales
Young international buyers
The Beauchamp Estates survey, which compared sales of luxury properties over £15 million in 2024 and 2023 using LonRes and Beauchamp Estates’ data, found that the sales market for homes worth more than £15 million in London during 2024 was driven by ‘young international buyers’.
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‘The average age of buyers of London homes worth £25 million or more is now just 41, down 12 years in the last decade,’ George Brooksbank, the CEO of Fairway Capital, said. He added that ‘the market is being driven by a new generation of younger buyers who are wealthy, mostly self-made, and are far more bullish and impulsive than older buyers, who are more cautious and bearish about the market.’
The Beauchamp report noted that these younger buyers preferred newly built large apartments or houses with a major refurbishment, such as the ex-Rolls-Royce property, rather than older luxury homes.
Jump in American and Middle-Eastern buyers
American buyers accounted for 25 per cent of all super-prime sales in 2024 (against 18 per cent in 2023), making them the ‘largest buyer group by country of origin,’, the survey found. They were followed by buyers from the Middle-East, who made up 20 per cent of all sales (up from 18 per cent the previous year).
‘A key reason for this year’s significant upturn in American and Middle East buyers in London is the exchange rate advantage that [those] buyers benefit from using dollars to buy homes in the UK capital,’ says the director and head of new homes at Beauchamp Estates Paul Finch.
‘Back in 2016 American buyers effectively benefitted from a seven per cent price discount due to the strength of the US dollar against the pound. In 2024 this has grown to an 18 per cent price discount.,’ Finch explains. He adds that ‘the exchange rate benefit is similar for Middle East buyers, since the Qatari and Saudi Riyal and UAE Dirham shadow the US dollar, so Gulf buyers have also seen their buying power dramatically increase due to exchange rate shifts.’
The number of high-end properties sold to clients from the UK fell from 12 to 10 per cent between 2023 and 2024, with a similar trend for buyers from Eastern Europe (13 to eight per cent) ‘due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war’, the report says.
From Knightsbridge to Mayfair
London’s most exclusive addresses have always included Mayfair, but in 2024, its popularity grew even further. It accounted for nine of the 40 deals above £15 million, eight more than the previous year. The survey named Mayfair the ‘address of choice’ for UHNWs, with buyers from the US, the Middle East, and South Asia drawn to the area’s stylish restaurants on Mount Street and luxury boutiques on Bond Street.
[See also: Super-rich line up for 1 Mayfair £35-million luxury residences]
Chelsea, St John’s Wood, Kensington and Notting Hill also remained popular with the wealthy, including billionaire designer Tom Ford, who reportedly snapped up a £80 million house in Chelsea Barracks just before the stamp duty rise deadline following Rachel Reeves’s budget on 31 October.
Knightsbridge and Belgravia, however, saw their prime property sales dip in 2024 partly due to the many older buildings and properties in need of refurbishment. But in another sale that bucked the trend, Belgravia mansion on Wilton Crescent, originally the London home of the Earls of Bessborough and most recently financier Glenn Maud, has been sold to a UK buyer for £38 million. The sale, Fairway Capital say, is London’s first super-prime property deal of 2025.
What to expect in luxury property sales in 2025
Beauchamp’s wealth survey predicts that sales of new and newly refurbished properties in Mayfair priced above £15 million will rise by one or two per cent in 2025. In areas like Knightsbridge, Belgravia, and Hampstead, especially for second-hand homes needing refurbishment, prices are expected to drop by two to four per cent.
The report also suggested that buyers from the US and the Middle East will drive the market in 2025. The firm’s managing director Jeremy Gee said that ‘over the next four years the wave of American buyers into London looks set to increase further.’
He adds: ‘Last time Donald Trump was in power we saw a significant 20 per cent upturn in wealthy Democrats buying £15 million-plus homes in London to live out the first Trump administration. Since June 2024 onwards we noticed a 30 per cent rise in overseas clients enquiring about suitable homes in the capital that they could purchase, and the largest group of buyers have been Americans.’
[See also: Will these ‘outrageous predictions’ come true in 2025?]
