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Mayfair Lives Up to Its Slot on the Monopoly Board

The neighborhood is set to reclaim its crown as London’s best-performing prime residential location

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This eight-bedroom house in Balfour Mews, Mayfair, is £27.5 million

Knight Frank
This eight-bedroom house in Balfour Mews, Mayfair, is £27.5 million
Knight Frank

Mayfair is the most expensive location on the classic Monopoly board. It’s a winning strategy to buy the blue prime property location, for £400, where houses cost £200 and rents range from £50 to £2,000. In the mid-1930s when the board game was released, Mayfair was changing from a prime residential district into a commercial centre. This year it is set to reclaim its crown as London’s best-performing prime residential location — although its houses cost substantially more than £200. The value of £200 paid in 1935 is £10,000 in today’s money. However, that is barely enough to buy 1 sq ft in the neighbourhood. The UK’s most expensive home sale of 2015 was believed to have been in Mayfair. A 21,000 sq ft office-to-home conversion in Upper Brook Street was sold to a US businessman for £90 million. Meanwhile, a penthouse was sold off-plan in 77 Mayfair for just under £7,000 per sq ft, setting a new record for the area — only one of the seven apartments in the development remains, at a price of £24 million.

For property prices, Mayfair is second only to the Knightsbridge postcode of SW1X, home to One Hyde Park, although most property specialists think that will change this year. “I believe that Mayfair is experiencing its most exciting decade in almost a century. Don’t wait to buy in Mayfair, buy in Mayfair and wait,” says Peter Wetherell, of Wetherell, a Mayfair estate agency. The area has undergone regeneration over the past ten years, with Mount Street transformed from an area dominated by antique shops to one filled with luxury boutiques, along with high-quality office-to-residential conversions and a number of new-build developments.

A two-bedroom apartment in Mount Street is on the market for £7.15 million.

Wetherell

This has helped to make Mayfair more resilient than other prime central London locations, despite the chancellor’s stamp-duty hike for properties valued over £1.1 million at the end of 2014, which dampened demand and price growth. According to Tom Bill, the head of London residential research at Knight Frank, sales in prime central London fell by 19.5 per cent in the first half of 2015 compared to the year before. The fall was felt most acutely in Chelsea (37 per cent), followed by Knightsbridge (27 per cent). In Mayfair, sales fell by 0.9 per cent in the same period. Bill, who is the author of Knight Frank’s market report on the location, seen exclusively by The Times, says: “There are several reasons for this relatively strong performance, including the global cachet of the Mayfair name, the high quality of the area’s development pipeline and the fact that price growth has recently started to catch up with London’s other golden postcodes.” According to Knight Frank, price growth in Mayfair in the year to December was 3 per cent, compared with 1 per cent across all of prime central London. Meanwhile, prices were down 6.1 per cent in Knightsbridge and 2.7 per cent in Chelsea. There is, however, room for Mayfair values to rise further, according to Bill. Property prices in the area have grown by 58 per cent since March 2009. This compares to 76 per cent in Kensington, 71 per cent in Knightsbridge and 62 per cent in Chelsea.

This four-bedroom house in Charles Street is £15 million.

Knight Frank

Harvey Cyzer, the head of Knight Frank’s office in Mayfair, says: “The main reason the area will outperform others is the draw of new developments with the high-quality services and amenities which attract very high-net-worth individuals.” According to Wetherell, there are 538 homes in the planning and construction pipeline in Mayfair. Developments include Clarges Mayfair by British Land, Mayfair Park Residences by Clivedale, and Finchatton’s conversion of the former US Naval Headquarters on Grosvenor Square; a supply for which there is ample demand, according to local estate agents. The only cloud on the horizon is the chancellor’s latest stamp-duty levy on second homes, which is likely to affect the majority of international buyers, raising the top level paid on Mayfair’s expensive homes from 12 per cent to 15 per cent. However, Mayfair has always sat between “super tax” and “collect £200 as you pass go”. This article originally appeared on The Times of London.