Ice rinks, nightclubs, infrared saunas and digital-detox zones: millennials have entered the super-prime London housing market.
Properties worth £10m and more in the capital were historically bought by the “old-money” bankers and lawyers.
But “gone are the days when you’d have people buying prime and super-prime in their 60s,” says Rhianne McIlroy, of property consultants Middleton Advisors.
A new kind of wealth is on the scene. People in their 30s and 40s who have made their money in crypto or tech – or even as social media influencers – are buying these trophy homes.
“Younger people are making their fortune faster as a consequence of digitalisation – you literally can run a multimillion-pound business from an iPhone,” says Stuart Bailey, head of super-prime London sales at estate agency Knight Frank.
And what they want is very different from the generation of buyers before them.
Jo Eccles, of buying agency Eccord, says a homeowner in Battersea had a small ice rink put in because her son is brilliant at ice hockey, and another one had a slide put in from the top to the bottom of their house in Knightsbridge.
And forget open-plan kitchens or home gyms, the trend taking super-prime London by storm is having a nightclub in your basement.
Here, buying agents tell Telegraph Money how wealthy millennials are shaking up the property market.
A new kind of wealth
“In the past three years, everyone spending more than £20m has been in their 30s or 40s,” says Eccles.
“When I started my career, a lot of the buying activity in London was driven by traditional banker bonuses and so had a seasonal trend. Now it’s completely different.”
Her clients now work as algorithmic or commodity traders, or are entrepreneurs in renewable energy or AI.
Becky Fatemi, of Sotheby’s buying arm, says she is now working with ultra-billionaires. “I call them two-digit billionaires. Last year we wouldn’t have been speaking about this kind of wealth.”
Influencers have also burst on the scene as social media platforms generate substantial wealth.
“We’re just about to start working with an influencer who we worked with previously and now they’re ready to upsize,” says Eccles.
Caspar Harvard-Walls, of private property network Oskar, says another reason buyers are getting younger is that they are beginning to cash in their inheritance.
“We’ve had a generation who are in their late 50s or 60s now and have done really well within hedge funds or private equity, and now their children in their 20s and 30s have this ability to buy really expensive property at a very young age.”
