The buzz words in the residential investment team of late are definitely ‘special purchaser’. We’ve seen some huge prices being paid for residential property which at first glance wouldn’t seem to make financial sense, but these are transactions made by a purchaser who has a special interest in the property over and above any potential return on his investment.
We recently marketed a property in Bayham St, Camden, an attractive period warehouse / office building with potential for residential re-development. With the waning supply of office space in the area, all the eagerly interested residential developers were outbid by the eventual purchaser who had desperately wanted an office for his digital design business. Nice healthy profit for our client and a good solid base for a business occupier.
With planning permission for conversion into four flats, you’d think a Grade II Listed Building on Grays Inn Road, Bloomsbury, would simply be just a numbers game for a resi developer. Not so. Enter a developer who is so keen to keep his established building team together he is willing to pay more than anyone else to secure this project. I know good tradesmen are hard to find but…. Still, everyone went home happy – apart from the string of residential investors who yet again lost out to the special purchaser.
Hunting for that special purchaser is made easier of course by the volume of your contact database, something which Allsop prides itself on, but predicting why your property might attract a special purchaser is not always immediately evident, nor in some cases, logical. I guess that’s why we call them ‘special’.
Michael Linane MRICS
