Roughly 60,000 U.K. Homeowners Can No Longer Claim to Be ‘Property Millionaires’ as Values Fall
The number of so-called property millionaires—or those who own a home valued at £1 million (US$1.27 million) or more—declined by 8% last year, according to new data from Savills.
That means more than 60,000 Brits saw their home’s value drop below the million-pound mark, with owners in England’s South East region seeing the hardest hit, according to the report from the London-based brokerage on Monday.
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More than 23,000 residents lost their “property millionaire” title last year in the South East, a swath of affluent counties surrounding London, including Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, as well as the cities Brighton and Oxford.
Home prices in the capital’s neighboring counties have stumbled since their mid-pandemic peaks, as the frenzied rush for green space subsides and people move back to London.
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“The race for space and dash to the countryside from mid-2020 drove a sharp increase in the number of £1 million homes outside of London and other urban settings,” Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, said in a news release.
“However, increased mortgage costs and a rebalancing of demand back to city living have meant about 30% of those whose homes crossed the £1 million threshold, have, for the time being at least, become aspiring million-pound homeowners once again,” he added.
London saw roughly 12,000 homeowners lose their “property millionaire” status, though that only equated to a 4% decline, the smallest nationwide. By comparison, the South East, East of England, Wales, and Yorkshire and the Humber all saw a 13% drop in property millionaires, the biggest falls in percentage terms.
Still, the number of Brits who can claim the title is far above pre-pandemic times. Across the U.K., property millionaires are up 28% over 2019, according to Savills.
