Read in todays Telegraph about an anonymous Belgravia Resident looking for a blonde female companion over Fifty.  This was spotted by Mandrake (Daily Telegraph) in the ‘Wanted Section’ of The Times.  He adds  ”a good time is guaranteed”.   Perhaps he should join the Belgravia Residents Association ….

http://www.tatler.com/bystander/events/2013/april/margaret-thatcher#/9964/image/8

London locales so costly they’re barely lived in

BY SARAH LYALL

LONDON — An odd thing was happening, or rather not happening, as dusk fell the other day across Belgravia, home to some of the world’s most valuable real estate: Almost no one seemed to be coming home. Perhaps half the windows were dark.

‘‘Belgravia is becoming a village with less and less people in it,’’ said Alistair Boscawen, a local real estate agent here in ‘‘the nuts area’’ of London, as he put it, ‘‘where the house prices are bonkers’’ — anywhere from £5 million, or $7.5 million, to £40 million or £50 million, he said. But it seems that practically the only people who can afford those kinds of houses are people so rich they don’t actually need to live in them.

Last year, the real estate firm Savills found that 54 percent of peoplebuying property in the most expensive parts of central London did not intend them to be primary residences.

The buyers for such properties are increasingly superwealthy foreigners from places like Russia, Kazakhstan, Southeast Asia and India. For them, London is just a stop in a peripatetic international existence that these days might also include New York, Moscow and Monaco.

‘‘Life when you’re in that sort of wealth bracket is a very different concept,’’ said Yolande Barnes, Savills’s director of world research. ‘‘London is part of an annual pilgrimage from one billionaire enclave to another, sothat these aren’t homes in the traditional sense, but houses left empty for parts of the year.’’

London is not the only city where the world’s richest people leave their expensive properties vacant while they stay in their expensive properties someplace else; the same is true in parts of New York. But the difference is that so many of them are foreign.

‘‘Many areas of central London have become prohibitively expensive for local residents,’’ a recent report by the Smith Institute, a research group in London, said recently.

Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council, said that the situation had reached a ‘‘tipping point’’ and was starting to concern lawmakers.

‘‘Some of the richest people in the world are buying property here as an investment,’’ he said. ‘‘They may live here for a fortnight in the summer, but for the rest of the year they’re contributing nothing to the local economy. The specter of new buildings where there are no lights on is a real problem.’’

In its report, Savills found that in 2011-12, 34 percent of people buying residential properties in the resale market in prime areas of London — places like Kensington, Chelsea and Mayfair, as well as Belgravia — were from overseas, up from 24 percent in pre-crisis 2007. In the most exclusive spots, foreigners accounted for 59 percent of the sales.

This has had the affect of making parts of London more international, more expensive and more empty.

Along Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, home to a Poilâne bakery outlet and various tony boutiques, foot traffic the other day was very slow. A Belgravia resident from Colombia, who was shopping at a pet accessories store where dog beds go for £240 and cat blankets for about £190, said that there were two English people along her street, and that it was hard to tell whether many of her neighbors were there or not there.

‘‘French, American, Petra Ecclestone’’ — that would be the daughter of the Formula 1 impresario Bernie Ecclestone — ‘‘and Russians,’’ said the resident, considering those closest to her. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because, she said, she was scared of the Russians on the corner.

Meanwhile, the salesclerk at a clothing boutique nearby, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want to get in trouble, said that at some times of the year, the area was completely empty. ‘‘We’ll shut for the whole of August,’’ she said.

Many foreign purchasers are buying to rent, said Naomi Heaton, chief executive of London Central Portfolio, which represents high-end buyers. ‘‘There is a definite concern about ‘lights out, London,’’’ she said, ‘‘but the reality is that half of what is bought is bought for rental.’’

But not at the top end, said Ms. Barnes of Savills.

‘‘The very wealthy won’t rent their houses out — why would they?’’ she said. ‘‘It’s more like buying their own private hotel, really — an alternative to living in a suite at the Dorchester.’’

Meanwhile, prices are rising beyond expectation. For single family housing in the prime areas of London, the average British buyer spends £1.5 million, Ms. Barnes said, while the average foreign buyer spends £2.5 million — which increases to £5 million if he or she is from Russia or the Middle East.

Of newly developed properties in what are considered ‘‘ultra-prime’’ apartment complexes, those offering hotel-style amenities and apartments priced at more than £5 million, 78 percent of purchases last year were made by foreigners, the report said. Brokers are marketing new properties abroad in places like Hong Kong and Singapore even before advertising in Britain, as they did for Cornwall Terrace, a development at the edge of Regent’s Park where houses are priced at £30 million to £58 million.

The most visible, and also the most notorious, of the new developments is One Hyde Park, a £1 billion apartment building of stratospheric opulence on a prime corner in Knightsbridge — near Harvey Nichols, the park and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which functions as a 24-hour concierge service for residents. Apartments there have been purchased mostly by foreign buyers who hide their identities behind murky offshore companies registered to tax havens like the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands.

It is rare to see anyone coming or going at the building, and British newspapers have been trying since the complex opened two years ago to discover who actually lives there. Vanity Fair reported recently that the owners include a cast of characters who might have come from a poker game in a James Bond movie: a Russian property magnate; a Nigerian oil billionairess; the richest man in Ukraine; a Kazakh copper tycoon; a Malaysian couple with a SoutheastAsian property empire; and a Kazakh singer.

One resident, Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian, paid £136 million for two penthouse apartments that he combined into one, at a reported additional cost of some £60 million.

The magazine also reported that only 17 of 76 apartments, which have been sold for a total of £2.7 billion, are registered as primary residences — which means that the owners pay only negligible ‘‘second home’’ taxes of a few thousand dollars a year. Mr. Dimoldenberg called the building ‘‘London’s Marie Celeste’’ and said it ‘‘contributes nothing to local businesses or London’s economy.’’

London’s housing market is at odds with that in the rest of the country, floundering since the 2008 crisis and now hit by a new wave of austerity-driven budget cuts. While housing prices outside the city fell by 10 percent in the last five years, inside London they increased by 21 percent. In Mayfair alone, they rose by 30 percent. A house in Chester Square that sold for £1.6 million as a long-term lease in 1987, Mr. Boscawen said, sold last year, as an outright purchase, for £13 million pounds.

An American who lived for 20 years in a multimillion-pound apartment in Belgrave Place, and who did not want her name used for fear of alienating her old neighbors, said that the quiet could become oppressive.

Most of her neighbors seemed to be away most of the time, and she never met any of them.

‘‘So I was kind of excited when a Russian family moved in across the street,’’ she said. ‘‘I put a welcoming note through their letterbox, introducing myself.’’

The neighbors invited her to their Christmas party, where she ate caviar, drank vodka and listened to Russian classical music.

‘‘I tried to meet people, but they didn’t speak much English,’’ she continued. ‘‘Anyway, that was the last I saw of my neighbors. I think they spend most of their time in Palm Beach.’’ ◼

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