It appears the music may have finally stopped for one of the world’s largest luxury real estate bubbles: London.
It’s well known that foreign oligarchs love London real estate as a means to launder funds, typically “earned” by soaking their host countries dry via corruption and fraud. This has caused absurd and irrational spikes in high-end residential real estate in the English capital, as well as a flood of new construction.
With emerging markets now completely collapsing, the seemingly endless flood of foreign money is drying up, and with it, London real estate.
So has the London real estate bubble popped? Probably.
– From the September 9, 2015 article: Luxury London Home Sales Plunge 26% – Has this Mega Real Estate Bubble Finally Burst?
London’s luxury property bubble seems to have popped sometime during the second half of last year, something I’ve written about repeatedly over the past several months.
One of the primary drivers behind the weakness in this “asset class” is a sharp reduction in the numbers of foreign criminals laundering money via London real estate. Just in case you still harbored any doubts about high-end London property being little more than bank accounts for shady foreign oligarchs, we learn the following from Bloomberg:
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