More than 7,000 £1m-plus homes are being bought each year for cash.
Analysis of data from Land Register for the past five years shows that over £63bn has been spent on homes without the need for mortgages in England and Wales.
The average cash buyer splashed out £1.75m. Around one in three £1m-plus property purchases are cash.
Nearly two-thirds of the £1m-plus cash buyers were in London where the average spent was £1.89m – but there were also strong sales of £1m-plus homes for cash elsewhere in the south.
The numbers were crunched by equity release firm Bower Private Clients.
Comments (3)
Money laundering by Russians etc.
I have to say there is a certain amount of coincidence and curiosity about the stuff we are seeing, but I am content that rather than us being “people who don’t understand the data” Land registry are correcting the errors and duplications we have highlighted.
That isn’t strictly true, £21.6 billion of that didn’t have a mortgage because it didn’t actually exist. From sometime in 2013 117,000 data anomalies occurred in the land registry data which included several (too many to be accidental) multi million pound duplications. The biggest of which were duplicate entries for £85,000,000 in EC1a followed by a couple of £65,000,000 sales for HMRC.