Top Ten London Selling

‘I went from despair to elation in a matter of hours,’ says Trevor Abrahmsohn. He speaks to Spear’s over the phone from his Florida pied-à-terre, but his good mood is more down to politics than the balmy weather. ‘I have followed the macroeconomic ramifications of politics for the last 45 years, and there has never been such a stark choice,’ he says of the recent UK general election. ‘The result was one that you didn’t dare dream of. The whole of Britain dodged not just a bullet but a nuclear device.’ Boris Johnson has ‘turned base metal into gold’, he says. One of the first things on his agenda should be to reassess the stamp duty changes ‘imposed by that hapless former chancellor’ George Osborne in 2014. It was ‘arrogance’, Abrahmsohn says, that stopped Osborne from understanding that they would stymie the market and actually generate less money for the exchequer. ‘No one cares too much about estate agents,’ says Abrahmsohn, but large swathes of the housing market have struggled, making life difficult for ‘solicitors, surveyors and the construction business’ as well. A ‘healthy, liquid market’ can be part of a new UK economic success story, he adds. ‘Post-Brexit, anyone who doesn’t realise we are Treasure Island just doesn’t get it.