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For sale: Scout hut £250,000-plus
For sale:
A bijoux property, with a wealth of period features retained by owners to create a leading example of shabby chic.
Situated in a prime location in leafy Brondesbury, this semi-detached home has an authentic brick, broken glass and timber board facade and an open-plan living space ideal for growing families.
The property has benefitted from the latest in de-landscaped gardening over recent years with the current owner including the distressed ornaments surrounding the building in the sale.
Ideal for imaginative owners looking to renovate or expand.
Priced to sell: £250,000-plus.
It's an easy joke right? You know the one: write a humourous mock estate agent's blurb for rundown building for sale; whack a crazy price on the end to make the gag obvious; Bob's your uncle.
The difference here is that the price isn't a joke.
This dilapidated former scout hut, just off the Kilburn High Road, really is for sale at auction with a guide price of £250,000-plus and, despite not even benefitting from a fancy estate agent's blurb, it is almost guaranteed to go for substantially more.
In the crazy world of property in London and the South East - which resembles less of a housing market and more of a housing feeding frenzy - a rundown scout hut in Kilburn will cost you more than a quarter of a million pounds.
It's true, this scout hut is probably not likely to be a scout hut for long after its sale. Its potential value is in the land it sits on, so there probably isn't too much bob-a-jobbing going on in Kilburn as local scouts try and raise the purchase price. The new owners will knock it down and build a house and the auctioneers McHugh & Co. highlight that option. They explain that a scheme has been prepared for a new four-bedroom house and feature a small illustrative drawing. A house on this road would set you back at least £600,000.
However, This is Money's resident property bear Richard Browning has pointed out planning permission hasn't even been applied for, let alone granted, and this drawing is less of a plan and more of an Etch-A-Sketch.
He was slightly suprised to discover that his suggestion of a price of around £90,000 - 'in this insane market' - was considerably below the auctioneers' suggested £250,000-plus.
But what does he know?
After all, he's just an observer to the madness. Surely, all those people buying houses in London and the South East only to knock them down and build another must know what they're doing. Well, they probably do, and with support from their healthy profits already banked from the property market over the past ten years, or their hundreds of thousands in City bonuses, they will probably turn another nice profit on their latest investments.
But a market in which rundown former scout huts in Kilburn are on sale for more than a quarter of a million is surely not sustainable.
Especially when the agents don't even need to gloss it up and the owners don't even bother to pick up the rubbish outside.
- Simon Lambert, This is Money
Useful links:
Join the Scouts - it's their centenary year
Draw your own home with online Etch A Sketch
Does anyone need any further proof of a massive house price bubble? This is beyond supply and demand. Just waiting for the POP.... not long now...
Posted by: Mark | April 28, 2007 at 11:51 PM