The Crown Estate owns £800 million worth of empty properties in London, an investigation has revealed.
It includes 312 vacant properties in the Greater London area, including Regent Street rooms and other central London spaces including garages and offices, according to City A.M.
According to the official website, the Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch "in right of The Crown".
It says it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, but it is not their private property and cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it belong to the monarch.
The Crown Estate told the Independent that 92 per cent of the space and property units analysed by City A.M. were car parking spaces, properties vacant for redevelopment, demolished as part of a redevelopment, or have been sold, let or occupied already.
EMoov, an online estate agent, estimated that the total value of the properties is £825 million, based on average price per square foot for the post code and type of property. The vacant space could fit 546 new flats based on the size of the average flat in London.
“We’ve been saying for some time that empty publicly owned properties are an important part of the solution to the housing deficit, but the sheer total is a pretty astonishing value,” Russell Quirk, chief executive of online estate agent eMoov, told City A.M.
The Crown estate holds almost £6 billion of real estate in central London, comprising holdings in Regent Street and St James's.
“We operate in effect like a commercial property developer, so it’s quite natural that we’re taking back leases and redeveloping those assets,” the spokesperson said.
EMoov said that three Regent Street meeting rooms worth nearly £800,000 had been vacant for over 12 years. Some of the 45 properties owned by the Crown Estate have been empty since 2012.
“The country is still in the grip of a housing crisis, whilst an abundance of government owned buildings lie vacant,” said Quirk. He told the paper that local government should “get its arse in gear, quite frankly” and either develop or sell its empty assets.
The Crown Estate posted record profits of £285.1m in the last financial year. These profits are required by an Act of Parliement to be returned to the Treasury for the benefit of public finances. The Treasury then gives 15 per cent of the profits to the Queen.
No comments:
Post a Comment