West Hampstead Life

Category: Property News

  • Is Mill Apartments £15,000 sweetener enough?

    A couple of months ago I went to have a look round the show apartment at the Mill Apartments. Back then they were called the Mill Apartments Hampstead, though they have since been rebranded – extremely sensibly – as the Mill Apartments West Hampstead (although the website address hasn’t changed). I saw a 3-bed flat, which was very nice. And very expensive. £815,000 expensive to be precise for this first floor flat. The service charge would be in excess of £2,500 a year and a parking space was an extra £25,000. More hilarious was that if you wanted storage space in the basement “big enough for a bike and a couple of sets of golf clubs”, then you’d have to part with another £10,000. I think I laughed out loud at this point. Sounds like I might not have been the only one.

    You might argue that £815,000 for a modern nice 3-bed flat in West Hampstead isn’t out of the ordinary. By the way, lets not kid ourselves here, while pretending these apartments are in Hampstead was presumably verging on some sort of property misdescription, they can hardly be said to be in the heart of West Hampstead either. Shoot-Up Hill is much nearer than West End Lane. Nevertheless, it is quite a lot of money for any flat around here outside the NW3/NW8 postcode. This is the cheapest 3-bed in the building, they go up in price as you go up the floors, so the 3rd floor 3-bed flat is £830,500.

    Floorplan of the 3-bed apartments

    Which brings me to the point of this story. To date, 17 of the 27 non-social housing flats in the development have sold (the three 3-beds have not). The prices for the four penthouses, which are just coming on the market now, are not on the website, but early communications said that the top price flat would be £1.5m, so I guess we assume that’s the price of the only 3-bed penthouse, while the cheapest penthouse is £1.35m.

    Looking south from one of the penthouse suites

    Given that the apartments don’t seem to be flying off the shelves, so the developer, Taylor Wimpey, is holding an open day and resorting to “buy now” discounts in the form of cash/cash-equivalent incentives.

    If you sign on the dotted line this Saturday at the open-day then it will throw in either a luxury holiday, £15,000 to spend at Selfridges or a brand new Mini. According to the PR company, “Offering these incentives is a new trend for estate agents and house builders, in order to kick-start a property industry that has slowed in recent years.” Or in other words “we overpriced the apartments a bit”. Now, if you’re willing to drop £1.5m on a 3-bed apartment in what is almost Cricklewood, it’s debatable whether a £15,000 cashback deal (1%) is going to make much difference to your yes/no decision. Even for the cheapest apartment still available (£588,000), you’d only be getting a 2.5% discount.

    The press release implies, although certainly doesn’t make clear, that that expensive car parking space might be thrown in as well (or a 2-year parking permit). That’s a far more valuable incentive, both financially and practically, but this is a common negotiating tool as far as I’m aware.

    Anyway, if you want to go along on Saturday, then there’ll be drinks, nibbles and live music between 11am and 3pm. If you want to view an apartment (and surely that’s the only reason to go), then best reserve in advance by calling 0845 676 2377. Even if you don’t have half a million quid to spend on the day, us locals are apparently welcome. I quote: “It is also a fab opportunity for local residents to find out more about their newest neighbour!”. Which is very friendly.

    What’s sold and what’s not by Sep 26th 2012 (penthouses not included)

  • Live long and prosper – move out of NW6

    Maps have always been a powerful way of highlighting London’s social inequalities (Charles Booth‘s and John Snow‘s are the most iconic examples of this) and they continue to show how the richest and poorest Londoners often live side by side.

    (SpatialAnalysis.co.uk)

    The latest map from UCL’s Spatial Analysis team overlays two sets of data – life expectancy and child poverty. The team wanted to see whether the adage held true that a year in life expectancy is lost for every station eastbound on the Jubilee Line between Westminster and Canning Town.

    You can read the full article for the methodology, or click the map for the full view of London, but lets look briefly at the findings locally.

    People living within 200 metres of both TfL’s West Hampstead stations have a life expectancy of 81. This is pretty much bang on the national average (which is 78 for men and 82 for women) but lower than our neighbours to the south on the Jubilee Line, to the west on the overground and Bakerloo, and on a par with that in Kilburn.

    It’s not especially surprising that wealthy St John’s Wood (83) or Maida Vale (86) have higher life expectancies. In fact the borough of Westminster has the second highest life expectancy in the country, but perhaps marginally surprising that West Hampstead fares as well (or as badly) as Kilburn Park or Kilburn High Road. If we look at the Guardian’s deprivation map from April this year, we can see that the West Hampstead stations are marginally better off than Kilburn’s stations, and the child poverty data above tallies with that. So, why the discrepancy?

    Frankly, that’s not the right question to be asking. This sort of mapped analysis is not intended to be a perfect reflection of the reality on the ground. Mapping is all about scale, and this London life expectancy map is best seen as a way to see general changes along tube lines, where the trends are very clear. There is, for example, an astonishing 21-year difference between the shortest (75.3) and longest (96.4) life expectancies. However, when you see that the longest life expectancy is for Oxford Circus and think how many people live within 200 metres of that tube station, you begin to see the challenge of trying to derive meaningful insights from individual data points. This doesn’t detract from the fact that there are large discrepancies, most notably from west to east – this is even more visible when you look at the child poverty data.

    You may think this is old news, but as a way to bring to life the concept not just of deprivation but of disparity, maps are surprisingly powerful. Take a look at the routes you regularly use to get around London, and next time you whoosh through the city (or, more pertinently, go to the Olympic Park) on a tube train, have a think about the areas you’re passing through out of sight. Maybe also have a think about whether a child born in east London deserves a lower life expectancy just because of where their parents live.