Pic credit: Rightmove
John Griffin, the founder of London taxi company Addison Lee, experienced what can only be described as a bad day after selling his London mansion overlooking Regent’s Park, leaving him with a loss of about £9.2 million, according to a report by The Telegraph.
He bought the six-bedroom house on Hanover Terrace in 2013 for £20.7 million. Thirteen years later, the mansion was sold for £11.5 million. For a man who once sold his taxi firm for a fortune, this property gamble wasn’t quite worth it.
Sold for nearly half the price he paid 13 years ago
The mansion sits on Hanover Terrace, in the heart of Regent’s Park. Part of a Regency-era row, the six-bedroom mansion was designed by the architect John Nash. The mansion was sold at the beginning of October for a 44% discount, according to a Bloomberg report.Griffin bought the house in the same year he sold his taxi firm, Addison Lee, to the Carlyle Group for about £300 million. He paid £20.7 million for the mansion in 2013, filings show.The house was first put on the market at a much higher price. Multiple reports suggested the mansion was listed in 2021 for £32 million. Even after several price cuts, it didn’t find a buyer. The property was taken off the market before returning this year at £13.5 million.
The final sale price came in below that figure, reports say.The sale comes a month after he lost a drawn-out battle with UK tax authorities.For years, Griffin has been fighting HMRC, the UK tax authority, over his tax residency. He argued that he should qualify for non-domiciled status between 2013 and 2020. That status would have kept income earned abroad outside the scope of UK tax. But in September, a tribunal ruled against him.
The sale was agreed before that ruling and completed less than a month after it, according to a person familiar with the process.
It is unclear whether the verdict affected the final price.Griffin’s sale fits a wider pattern. London’s prime property market has suffered in recent months amid tax changes and economic and political uncertainty. Estate agent JLL’s residential research data shows that 457 homes worth more than £5 million were sold in central London between July and September, The National News reported.
That was 11% fewer than in the previous quarter. Many of the city’s priciest properties have been hit by these tax changes and economic and political shocks.Property analysts LonRes told the publication that the prime London market saw a slowdown this summer, with average sale prices 7.9% lower in July than a year earlier and 5.7% lower than during the pre-Covid period. A property in Notting Hill sold for £25.9 million during the same period, even as prices fell around it.“Adding a new prime minister and continuing global uncertainty to the mix has resulted in a subdued prime London market, with the super-prime segment particularly affected. The key indicator is simply the number of transactions relative to new instructions, under offers and existing stock – it remains stubbornly low. Uncertainty and a lack of urgency, driven in part by low expectations of future price growth, continue to hinder any potential recovery,” LonRes told the outlet.“At the top end of the market, fewer people need to buy or sell, so the issues are amplified. Last year, we saw a prolonged slowdown as pre-budget tax speculation started in the summer and carried on all the way to the end of the year,” it added.In some areas, the slowdown has had little effect. Earlier this year, The Holme in Regent’s Park sold for a profit of about £56 million. The house had been taken out of receivership less than two years earlier for £139 million.