London’s ‘Nappy Valley’ Home Price Gains Outdo Luxury

December 21, 2013 Leave a comment

London’s ‘Nappy Valley’ Home Price Gains Outdo Luxury

Home prices in southwest London areas known as “nappy valley” for their appeal to families have climbed almost twice as fast as those in the city’s prime central neighborhoods this year as local buyers were priced out of the luxury market.Values in the best parts of southwest London, which includes the family-friendly districts of Wandsworth, Clapham and Battersea as well as Fulham, have jumped 14 percent in 2013. That compares with a 7.9 percent gain in neighborhoods like Mayfair and Knightsbridge that are more popular with overseas buyers, Savills Plc (SVS) said in a report today.

Investors from the Middle East to Asia have been buying luxury homes in central London, driving prices up beyond their levels before the financial crisis. That’s put those areas beyond the budgets of most U.K.-based buyers and boosted areas including Fulham, where values are half as high.

“Domestic wealth will force the next stage of market recovery,” Lucian Cook, a director of residential research at Savills, said in the report. He sees “more modest” growth in prime London and stronger regional gains next year “as wealth increasingly opts for a lifestyle move out of the capital.”

Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham are known for nappies, the British name for diapers, because of their appeal to families with young children who want to buy Victorian homes near parks and good schools, the broker said.

Homes in Marylebone, north of the Oxford Street shopping corridor, have gained 17.4 percent this year, the most in London, according to the report. The district is popular with U.K. and overseas buyers because values are about a quarter less than the most expensive parts of London, such as the West End.

Values in Knightsbridge and Mayfair have this year risen 5.3 percent and 11.6 percent, respectively, the broker said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Neil Callanan in London at ncallanan@bloomberg.net

Filed under Macro Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment