“Probably the most hateable TV show ever made”; “crass and tin-eared”; “artificial, vulgar, post-truth TV” – the reviews are in for Buying London, and they are savage.
Billed as the UK’s answer to Selling Sunset, Netflix’s much-anticipated series instead portrays London’s super-prime property market as awash with in-fighting, inexperience and reality TV rejects hoping for a second chance at fame – and industry insiders are less than impressed.
“The show shows no resemblance whatsoever to what goes on in a high-end super-prime estate agency,” says Charles Lloyd, head of Mayfair sales at Beauchamp Estates (who this week listed Cara Delevingne’s mega-mansion childhood home for £23.5m). How so? “I don’t know where to begin,” Lloyd sighs. “Everything.”
Buying London charts the exploits of DDRE Global, an agency set up in 2020 by Daniel Daggers, formerly of Knight Frank. It appears to have just a handful of staff but the drama is impressive: agents are pitted against one another for listings in the multi (multi) millions, cause spats with colleagues’ spouses, and seemingly pop off for sound baths in between viewings.
Lloyd, who knows Daggers, takes issue with its central storyline: two attractive female agents vying to be given a juicy new property, and then falling out (repeatedly) as the series goes on. This “charade” is one of many betraying the realities of how the super-prime world operates, Lloyd says.
“You don’t do that. You can’t have a listing and give it to one person to sell. It’s always a team effort.”
Beauchamp Estates is run by Gary Hersham, who the Sunday Times Rich List last year decreed “wouldn’t get out of bed for less than £50m”. Flashy, certainly, but par for the course on planet super-prime, a term used to denote properties upwards of £10m. (Or, per Lloyd, “it’s probably even £20-plus [million] nowadays.”)
A £113m 26,000sq ft mansion in Regent’s Park and a £55m penthouse in the Centre Point building with a wine tasting room were sold last year, while £3.1bn of sales were racked up in the year to March 2023. Typically purchased by hedge funders, international business tycoons or tech impresarios, the average age of a trophy home buyer is now 41 – down from 53 a decade ago.