A block of flats in Wimbledon Village, SW19, and a former magistrates court in Dover will go under the hammer at Savills’ sale next week, from a catalogue split 70/30 between London and regional stock.
The Wimbledon property is guided at £3.9m-plus and is being offered as a redevelopment or refurbishment opportunity. It contains eight vacant flats and has planning permission for a new-build development of nine two-bedroom flats with parking.
Auctioneer Chris Coleman Smith said: “It’s a real humdinger. It’s rare to get a new-build development in this location.”
The block is being sold on behalf of a private individual, who is “more of an investor than a developer” and is offered with an eight-week completion period to broaden the pool of potential buyers.
In Dover, the former court building in the centre of town is guided at £350,000-plus and is being sold on behalf of the Homes and Communities Agency, which handles the disposal of surplus public land. The two-storey, 25,000 sq ft building sits on a 0.78-acre site and includes holding cells, interview rooms and five large court rooms.
“Everyone will have different ideas of what to do with it –development, refurbishment, commercial, residential or hotel. It could suit a wide range of uses,” Coleman Smith said.
Some 30% of the catalogue comes from outside London, Coleman Smith said, a percentage that was up slightly on last year.
Two regional properties, in Bradford and Leicester, were attracting good interest, he added. The Bradford property is a vacant, freehold, unmodernised end-of-terrace house guided at £15,000-plus; the Leicester lot is a semi-detached house, also in need of modernisation and guided at £90,000-plus.
Coleman-Smith said that a flat in Greenwich, south-east London, guided at £1.2m, represented good value compared with a year ago. “Now is a fantastic buying time. Two years ago, the market was a bit frenzied – it was a good selling time.” Tougher lending criteria had “filtered out the dreamers,” he said, “leaving the more realistic punters”. But it was the restrictions on buy-to-let that had changed the market the most, he said.
“The professional buy-to-let investors are still active, but the people who were doing it with a bit of spare cash are on the back burner for the time being,” Coleman Smith said.
He urged more owner-occupiers to try the auction room to find value in the capital. “If you can get your finance sorted out, then auctions should be your first port of call,” he said.
The sale will take place at the London Marriott Hotel, W1, on 6 November.
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