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Daily Mail
June 15, 2014
Last week, as countless young Britons gazed longingly into estate agents’ windows displaying homes they can never hope to afford, I attended a glitzy property jamboree 6,000 miles away that made a mockery of their plight.
Side by side, on stalls in a vast exhibition hall overlooking Hong Kong harbour, English estate agents vied like barrow-boys to sell flats and houses to cash-rich Chinese speculators who were using our booming housing market like some alternative stock exchange.
They didn’t have to work very hard. As one of the agents, Alice Macdonald of Knight Knox International, remarked jubilantly after sealing another quick deal: ‘These people are buying British property as if they were shopping in Tesco!’
Wealthy foreign tycoons have been creaming off London’s finest properties for years, of course, but what made this two-day show so extraordinary was that the homes on offer were in areas that were until very recently way off their radar. Unfashionable locations such as Croydon, ten miles south of central London, with its street gangs and crime-ridden estates, and Liverpool, and the grim Manchester suburbs of Salford and Hulme.
With prices in Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair, Docklands and the City now too exorbitant for all but the super-rich, these have become the unlikely new hunting-grounds for the average Far Eastern investor.
The prospective buyers were not overly rich, either — at least not by the standards of Hong Kong and China. Those I met were mostly middle-class people who have saved prodigiously, and were looking for the best opportunity to maximise their returns.
Among the plethora of money-making schemes dangled before them at last weekend’s Smart Investment And International Property Expo was the chance to gamble on the future value of artwork and Hong Kong taxi licences.
However, Chinese investors love bricks and mortar. Armed with calculators, maps and a recent Rightmove report (translated into Mandarin) showing how house prices in Manchester skyrocketed by 18 per cent in the first quarter of 2014, while Croydon’s soared by 19.1 per cent, the serious players made a beeline for the stalls emblazoned with Union Jacks.
That they knew nothing about the northern cities on the menu in the great Chinese property take-away, and had never heard of Croydon, didn’t seem to matter one jot. Nor were they worried about paying hefty deposits on sleek new tower blocks still months or years from completion. (When I visited The Edridge, the luxurious 23-storey building being marketed in Croydon, complete with swimming pool, roof-garden and valet parking, I found nothing but a weed-strewn car-park.)
As several buyers told me, they have no intention of travelling to Britain to see the ‘commodities’ they are snapping up like squares on a Monopoly board, much less living in them.
One or two had vague plans to use them as student lodgings for their children, if they eventually attended an English university.
But the general idea was to buy ‘off-plan’ before the property has been built, while prices are rising fast, leave their flats to be rented out by a management company, then sell them — hopefully just as Britain’s housing bubble is about to burst.
Indeed, some said they would sell before they were built if prices keep rising. So it was enough to view scale models and computer-generated images of the properties, and to browse through brochures promising, in Croydon’s case, ‘superb transport links’ and easy access to such attractions as Windsor Castle (28 miles away) and Brighton, ‘one of the world’s top 10 city beaches’ (44 miles distant).
