Britain's £1m property hotspots - not where you would expect
Property millionaires tend to congregate in London and the South East, home to the most expensive houses in Britain, but as prices continue to rise pockets of housing market wealth are developing across the UK.
While £4.4bn worth of residential property deals on homes sold at more than £1m were completed in the South East - excluding London - in the 12 months to January 2014, £1.3bn of transactions occurred in the East of England.
East of England
This region, benefitting from the London overspill and better value than counties in the South East such as Surrey, had 954 £1m plus sales and was the highest performing region in England, Wales and Scotland, according to new research from the estate agents, Knight Frank.
Excluding London and the South East the new, emerging millionaire property hotspot was St Albans, classified as within the East of England, in which £217m worth of £1m plus sales were completed in 2014.
"St Albans has been a vibrant and growing market for the past decade, " said Oliver Beales, an agent at Knight Frank.
"Its character and parks have attracted London buyers looking to benefit from the price gap. With the London St Pancras rail link providing a fast commute and both state and independent schools in the area scoring very highly. We have seen a regular stream of London buyers taking advantages of these attributes and therefore driving the price in the area.”
South West
Behind the East of England, the research, which analysed the UK regions to find millionaire hotspots outside London and the South East, found that the South West had the second highest number of £1m plus sales in 2014 with a total value of £740m worth of property changing hands.
Within the South West, the area of Bath and North East Somerset was home to the biggest cluster of property millionaires, doing £128m of deals.
Unlike St Albans, Bath does not benefit from an overflow of commuters, rather people are choosing to live and work there or travel to Bristol, said Charlie Taylor, an estate agent at Knight Frank.
“Bath has had a strong year and with the electrification of the train line happening in due course, we have seen more people move from London to the area," he said.
North West
The North West was the third best performing region with the growing prosperity of Manchester driving up house prices - 166 deals were completed totalling £248m.
The area of Cheshire East saw the most £1m plus sales in the region with £107m done in total - almost half the value across the whole of the North West, showing the gulf between localised areas of property wealth and the rest of the region.
Nearly £240m worth of deals were completed in Scotland, driven by the buoyant housing market in Edinburgh, while the entire country of Wales saw the smallest number and value of deals with just 11 property sales worth more than £1m recorded.
There were 11 sales above the £1m mark in Wales compared to 2849 in the South East - this equates to a total sales value of £14m compared to £4.4bn.
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