What the flight of Russian money means for the London property market

Ever since the early 2000s, London’s luxury property market has been the preserve of foreign investors, many of whom are purported to be Russian. In Chelsea, Highgate and Hampstead, streets of empty mansions quickly became an inevitable part of city life, while the Russian investment phenomenon was dubbed ‘Londongrad’.

Thanks to the use of myriad offshore companies and ownership structures, and the practice of buying properties in the names of third parties – so called nominee accounts, it is all but impossible to identify the owners of these houses. Short of posting a private detective outside of each one for weeks on end and hoping the real owner shows up, the exact number of Oligarch-owned homes remains a mystery.

What is clear is that many high-net worth Russians might now be trying to free up capital by selling houses as Putin’s war rages in Ukraine and sanctions hit. Roman Abramovich has reportedly put his £150-million mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens and his three-storey waterfront penthouse in Chelsea – bought, it’s reported, for a whopping £22 million in 2018 – on the market. And