A Hometrack study of all 27m residential addresses in the UK, including social and private housing, suggests property values in the capital are worth 10 times more than Birmingham, the UK’s next biggest city.
Proximity to London plays a key role, with Reading, which would barely make it into the top 20 in Britain by population, ranked seventh by value. The total price of property in the town, at £50.3bn, is higher than Newcastle, Edinburgh, Belfast and Liverpool, and is only just below Bristol and Leeds.
The predictable north-south divide remains, however, other anomalies remain, including the fact property in York is worth more than Cambridge and property values in Huddersfield outstrip Oxford.
However, London is worth the same as the next 40 biggest British cities and towns combined.
Also, despite the £1.2tn personal debt mountain – most of it tied to mortgages – the country has a total of £4tn worth of equity (on paper) offering an LTV of 20%.
Richard Donnell, director of research at Hometrack, said: “The housing market’s total value is on a scale that dwarfs the commercial property market and is twice the size of the FTSE All-Share equity market. This is why housing is so important economically and as a store of wealth. With the value of outstanding mortgage debt at just over £1tn, the analysis shows just how much equity there is in the market.”
Hometrack statistics suggest there are 8m householders in Britain who own their homes outright.
