This map shows you why it's impossible for ordinary people to buy houses in London
The average house in London now costs about 12 times the average income, according to data from HMRC crunched by The Guardian.
And these wonderful interactive maps of who actually owns London properties, created by Private Eye, explain why prices in the capital are so ludicrous.
Londoners are not bidding against each other for houses. They are bidding against all of the world's rich people and the shell corporations they control.
This first map is Central London. The purple and orange dots (for leaseholds and freeholds, respectively) show that all the nicest buildings in the best areas around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are now owned by foreigners:
British people just don't own that much property in central London anymore. In the ultra-rich Mayfair neighbourhood - yes, the one that's most expensive square on the Monopoly board- building after building is owned by foreign investment companies:
A typical example is Flat 21 in Avenfield House on Park Lane (the other Monopoly board trophy). It was bought for £6.2 million ($10 million) by "Hung Yip Developments" of the British Virgin Islands, as this legend below shows:
According to the BBC, foreigners own £122 billion ($185 billion) in property in the UK, via offshore holding companies:
More than 100,000 UK property titles are registered to overseas companies, with more than 36,000 properties in London owned by offshore firms.
That value is the equivalent of the entire GDP of Kuwait or Vietnam. Here's the Guardian, to put that into real-money terms:
In 1995, the median income in London was £19,000 and the median house price was £83,000, meaning that people were spending 4.4 times their income on buying a property. But by 2012-13, the median income in London had increased to £24,600 and the median house price in the capital had increased to £300,000, meaning people were forced to spend 12.2 times their income on a house.
OK, so there are always going to be posh bits of town that the normals can't afford. Mayfair and Park Lane are outliers, and not representative of the city as a whole. So where in London can you go in order to avoid competing with foreign money when you're buying a new place?
