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Affluent Brits are pulling out of the UK property market at pace, the boss of a major London bank has said, as high taxes, burdensome regulation and stagnant house prices prompt investors to look elsewhere for greater returns.
Ian Rand, chief executive of Monument Bank, which caters for mass affluent account holders with six figures of investable assets, said wealthier customers were turning to other asset classes because even a “vanilla” stock market tracker fund consistently outperforms Britain’s property market.
“You’re realising that the stories you grew up with from your parents about investing in property being a way to make your money…those stories have gone,” Rand told City AM.
“The idea I had that I’m going to take a pot of money out of my retirement and I’m going to put it in a buy-to-let and not only do I get income from that, but that will appreciate over the next five years…that doesn’t work anymore.
“In a world where you are paying so much more for stamp duty, you’ve got to know that you’re going to live somewhere for a prolonged period of time in order to make that payment of stamp duty worthwhile. If you’re not convinced of that, you’re not going to move; if there’s no movement, there’s no demand; and if there’s no demand, there’s no price rises, so you’re going to have to look elsewhere [for a return on investment].”
London prime property market slump
The remarks come after a City AM analysis revealed the number of sales of prime properties in the capital fell by 37 per cent year-on-year – the biggest drop since 2015.
Using Land Registry data, City AM has analysed more than 1,000 transactions from the past decade, spanning more than 100 of the capital’s most-sought after residential streets.
While London’s prime property market reached a high point in 2021, with 156 sales across the streets surveyed, activity plummeted to only 84 transactions last year, the lowest since 2017.
This marks the biggest decline in activity in the capital’s luxury house market in a decade, nearly triple the size of the next-largest decline (13 per cent) coming in 2016.
The value of these transactions has stagnated. The best year for sale values came in 2016, when the average price of the sales analysed by City AM stood at £9.4m.
The average price of transactions last year edged up slightly from the year before – up from £8.6m to £8.7m – but stayed far below the rate of inflation, which by now should have put the average transaction at over £10m.
Race for affluent account holders
It comes as Monument Bank jostles with the UK’s biggest financial institutions to be the top destination for mass affluent customers, with the likes of HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds racing to acquire well-off customers.
According to its latest annual report, Monument grew its client base to 60,000 customers, with total deposits swelling to £1bn in 2023 to £5bn by the end of 2024.
The decision earlier this year by Natwest-owned Coutts, a bank aimed at high net worth customers, to treble the threshold for opening an account from £1m to £3m of investable assets, has swung the doors open to Monument and its rivals to snatch up customers who might otherwise have passed through Coutts’ doors.
Rand said Monument’s focus on technology allows it to expose customers to newer types of investment such as via tokenised assets.