David Sullivan, the British businessman who co-owns West Ham United football club, has cut the asking price of his London house by £10m and has blamed the promised crackdown on non-doms for rich people leaving the country.
Sullivan, the chair and biggest single shareholder of the Premier League club, has reduced the price of his 21,000 sq ft town townhouse in Marylebone to £65m as he said he had to be “realistic” about market conditions.
The six-storey house in Portland Place, an avenue near Regent’s Park, has original Georgian features and a grand staircase in the entrance hall. It also has a wine cellar, two garages, a lift, an indoor pool and sauna, and a chef’s kitchen. It went on the market last November.
The 75-year-old Welsh media magnate made his fortune as publisher of pornography magazines and owner of sex shops, and owned the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport tabloid newspapers from 1986 until 2007.
He bought the property in 2015 from Edward Davenport, who hosted celebrity-studded parties at the mansion and was later convicted of fraud. The house was used to film Amy Winehouse’s Rehab music video and parts of the film The King’s Speech before Sullivan’s purchase. The house has also served as the embassy for Sierra Leone.
“I’m selling it at a loss now, but you have to be realistic,” Sullivan told Bloomberg. He said he bought the house for £27m and spent just under £50m renovating it over seven years, taking his total spending to about £75m.
“Interest rates are high, they’re coming down but not much,” Sullivan said. “I also think what the government is doing to the non-doms isn’t very nice, and a lot of rich people are leaving the country as a result of what they anticipate in the budget. Three or four of my friends already have gone to Monaco or Dubai.”
The Labour government plans to change the policy that has allowed wealthy foreigners, known as non-doms, living in the UK to avoid local taxes on their overseas earnings for up to 15 years. The former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt had announced plans to phase out non-dom status from next April.
There are fears that the changes will not raise extra funds for the Treasury because of the impact of super-rich non-doms leaving the UK.
London’s most expensive homes are not selling, according to figures from the upmarket estate agent Knight Frank. It said there were 22% fewer sales of properties above £10m in the 12 months to July, compared with a year earlier, and super-prime sales volumes fell to £2.8bn from £4.3bn. There were 10 sales above £30m compared with 38 in the previous year.