I have been reading with interest the articles in the press about the Afghan family that is supposedly living in a £1.2 million council house. You see, the house in question is just round the corner from mine and if it really is worth £1.2 million that means Acton has been unaffected by the credit crunch. On the contrary, if the papers are to be believed, property prices in Acton have actually increased in the past 12 months. As someone who bought an almost identical property in the area last year, that came as an enormous relief.
When the story broke, I called Christian Harper, the Oliver Finn estate agent who sold me my house, to see if it was true. Was it possible that the Victorian property in question is worth £1.2 million? That was the value placed on it by the Daily Mail at the beginning of the week — all the more surprising given that the Mail ran a story the previous week in which it quoted a senior estate agent saying that prices in London were down 20 per cent.
‘It sounds outrageously optimistic to me,’ said Christian.
‘If you look on the land registry, the most a property in that street has achieved is just under a million and that was last year. Most of my business is in Chiswick rather than Acton, but I’ve seen some properties come down by as much as 25 per cent in the past 12 months.’
So that’s that, then. It looks as though my neighbourhood hasn’t bucked the trend after all. This is particularly worrying because, like many people who’ve bought property in the past year, I’m currently on a fixed rate mortgage that I’m due to come out of in the not too distant future.
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