Stuccoed on you: homebuyers with families seek passport to Pimlico

With their children at school in central London, it was both the convenience and the gleaming white, late-Georgian architecture that persuaded Jocelyn Cho Karp and her husband Adam to move to the Thameside neighbourhood of Pimlico. In January, they left the west London suburb of Ealing and moved into a Grade II-listed, five-bedroom town house by the Regency master builder Thomas Cubitt.

“We love the handsome stucco houses [ . . . ] and that our son can walk to school in Westminster,” says Cho Karp, a Taiwanese-American lawyer. Their new home is on the north-west edge of Pimlico, close to Sloane Square and the shops and cafés on Pimlico Road and Elizabeth Street. “We also hoped it would be a good investment — even though interest rates started rising as we finalised our purchase.”

Just the other side of Victoria coach and train stations from Chelsea and Belgravia, Pimlico has never been as fashionable as its neighbours, despite its attractive architecture and garden squares. There remains a big price differential — the average price per sq m for a house last year was £1,122, less than half that of Belgravia’s £2,347, according to LonRes, which tracks the London market. Yet the number of transactions across houses and flats was up 15 per cent on 2021, while sales volume in Belgravia dropped 14 per cent.

A bigger proportion of Pimlico’s transactions last year were houses rather than flats — 20 per cent of sales compared with the 10-12 per cent that has been typical in the area over the past decade, according to Hamptons using Land Registry data. There are now fewer second-home owners and investors but more families, says Laura Wilcox-Chandley of Savills Westminster.

“Families like the big lateral flats on the area’s garden squares — most ask for Eccleston or Warwick.” 

The average price paid for a flat in Pimlico last year was just under £890,000, which was 4.7 per cent lower than the peak in 2018 (also according to Hamptons using Land Registry data). Smaller pied-à-terre flats — the type favoured by MPs, thanks to the area’s proximity to the Houses of Parliament — have generally been less popular than they were in the past, perhaps because international buyers have been more likely to look at luxury new apartment schemes in neighbouring Westminster.

According to Hamptons, the proportion of applicants looking to buy second homes in Pimlico was 9 per cent in 2022, down from a peak of 32 per cent in 2015.

Of the 13 agreed sales so far this year for his estate agency, 10 of the buyers have paid cash rather than getting a mortgage, says Pavol Miksa of Chestertons. “Mortgage-dependent buyers have never been more than 30 per cent of our purchasers,” he adds. Of those agreed sales, six buyers are moving in full time, four are second homes and three are buy-to-lets.

Of the sellers, six are landlords disposing of rental properties, four are owner-occupiers moving on, two are second-home owners and one is a new-build.

Since so many of the area’s stucco-fronted houses have been divided into flats, those looking for a house often must wait a while, as Cho Karp attests after a year-long search. Sarah, who works in the City of London and prefers not to use her real name, has given up on buying a house in the area after living in three flats over 12 years: she is now in a four-bedroom flat on Warwick Square with her husband and two young daughters.

“Opting not to move out of central London, we spent months looking for the right house, but now we just want to buy the flat we rent; it’s ideal. We are happy to wait.”

Whole houses are most likely to be found on Alderney, Sussex, Sutherland and Cambridge Streets, part of the sought-after area that some agents refer to as the “Pimlico grid”, a layout of roads north of Lupus Street. Here, 2,200-3,000 sq ft properties sell for £2.5mn to £3.5mn, according to Miksa.

The most expensive homes are on the squares: a nine-bedroom house at 14 Eccleston Square sold for £6.25mn last June. Miksa’s most recent sale was agreed in early February — a two-bedroom split-level period conversion on Lupus Street, under the asking price of £1.4mn — with an American cash buyer.

Benjamin Scrace of Harding Green, an estate agent, says that with the exception of St George’s Square and Grosvenor Road, there’s a “price cap” of about £1,100 per sq ft on properties south of Lupus Street, an area mostly occupied by the Churchill Gardens estate. One-bedroom flats on the well-maintained postwar development with Bauhaus-inspired blocks sell from around £400,000. “Investors will buy the flats for rentals returns,” he says, though he hasn’t sold one recently. Flats in Churchill Gardens — some of which have a river view — currently rent for similar prices to stucco conversions, according to Elliot Taylor of Dexters Pimlico.

Mark Hardinge, a semi-retired reinsurance broker, has lived in a house on the grid since 2000 because of the easy logistics. “With an above-average police presence — maybe due to the MPs here — it feels a safe place to live, as well as friendly; we had a great [Platinum] Jubilee street party. I also like Tachbrook Street Market and hearing Big Ben chime from my house,” he says.

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