Don't blame Brexit – we're long overdue a fall in London property prices

A London property price crash has been on the cards for a while, says Merryn Somerset Webb. And the signs are, it might finally be getting under way.

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There's more to a fall in London property prices than Brexit

We've been warning about the risks in the London housing market for a while now. It looks like other people have started to notice those risks too: sales of new homes in London fell by 43% in the six months to the end of June relative to the same period last year. Square footage prices for new builds have now also fallen significantly, says Naomi Heaton of LCP: down 8% from the 2014 high for Battersea's Nine Elms area, for example.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.