London house prices might be cooling, but things are certainly hotting up at the premium end of the market.
Sales of properties costing more than £1m have reached record levels in the UK with 6,143 houses sold in the first half of the year- 70 per cent of which were in London.
That’s nearly 2,000 more than the same time last year and a rise of 46 per cent.
An additional 1,358 of those additional homes were in London, bringing the total number of properties sold in the capital worth more than £1m to 4,259.
The figures from Lloyds Bank reveal Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Wandsworth had the most properties priced at £1m or more, and one in every five sales of million pound homes in the country was in a London borough.
Outside the capital, the south east had the highest number of £1m plus property sales- just over a thousand- while the biggest increase occurred in the north east, where high value house sales more than doubled from six to 15.
Lloyds Bank private banking director Sarah Deaves said:
The number of homes sold for at least £1m is at a record high, with this sector of the housing market growing by almost a half in the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2013. Property values in prime locations have been boosted by growing demand from wealthy, and often cash rich, buyers from the UK and overseas, as well as limited supply of such properties.