The UK’s best-known house builder and founder of Berkeley Homes, Tony Pidgley (pictured, above), has called the bottom of the property market in London and claimed that the capital’s housing market will see a ‘revival’ next year.
Berkeley Group’s 72-year-old chairman made the comments over the weekend as he revealed that his company is to pay food store Morrisons £120 million for a site in Camden, central London.
The company is to build a new 40,000 sq ft store at the site as well as 450 homes and 100,000 sq ft of office space.
The project is one of several that Berkeley has acquired within inner London recently as it gambles that the next few years will see a revival in the London housing market despite punishing Stamp Duty bills for buyers and the lingering effects of Brexit.
“Pidgely always calls the market right,” says property PR guru and former eMoov CEO Russell Quirk (left). “If he says London will recover in 2020 and has bet £120m on it – follow him.”
His ability to correctly call the UK housing market is well documented. He sold off assets prior to the housing crash of 1989 and was among the first to spot that people were moving back into city centres in the early Nineties.
During the financial crisis Berkeley, which specialises in expensive properties in London and the South East, avoided the turmoil that swept through the wider housing market following the financial crash.
Pidgley subsequently spent the downturn snapping up prime sites in places such as Battersea and Wapping in London.
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