Following the small but beautifully formed flats thread.... (Title edited by MNHQ)

[NigellasGuest]

can anyone make my day by telling me studios in Central London are stalling in price?

My ceiling price is £500k, don't care about size but just location location location and a long lease! Planning to do this within 3 years.....

I’d expect they’d be stalling. Silly money to pay a cupboard + many landlords are reducing portfolio sizes.

Silly money is a matter of perception but if you believe they're stalling that's good news!

What I mean by silly money is that you need to be in like top 5% percent of earners to even afford a little studio flat so there won’t be much competition for them. Coupled with the fact that most people prefer larger properties + rental yields are very poor in central London + government is doing a lot to discourage buy to lets (and majority of studios are buy to lets), I’d expect that the prices aren’t very resilient.

Would anyone disagree that half a million pounds for a flat without a bedroom is silly money??

That is a good point! I'm not in the top 5% of earners though unfortunately !

If you’ve got 500k to spend you can get a one bed somewhere relatively central! So much nicer than a studio?

I can't see any one bedroom places in SW3 or SW7 further budget - unless they are on a shirt lease. Maybe if the market is stalling then they will come into my budget - I can hope !

If the lease is only a bit short, you could try to arrange for the current owner to extend it as part of the sale process. The money can go to the freeholder when your completion money gets paid.

However, half a mil doesn’t go very far in Chelsea at all. Even if prices fell by 10% then the flats currently valued at 550k would come down to your budget. Are those the sort of properties you’re thinking about? I doubt that, say, 700k properties would drop to 500k...

Thanks @JoJoSM2 .... What I'm looking at is properties currently at 500k that i can afford but in the hope that if prices drop then I might have a bit of money left over! Only want something very small, because of general maintenance and also it will be a second home anyway.

I started a thread a while back about extending leases and came to the conclusion that it would pretty much double the cost of the purchase so not going to entertain that idea!

If 500k is a stretch, Chelsea won't be much fun to live in- pop out for a pint of milk and a coffee and your week's budget is blown...

It's not a stretch - it's my budget