The Market

It looks like London's super-rich are opting for to wait and see for the next 12 months, as the very top-end of the rentals market - with six and seven figure annual rents - booms

London-based buying agency Black Brick is tipping Maida Vale as the investment hotspot to watch next year, although Marylebone should remain the go-to option for discerning owner-occupiers... C

One Hyde Park, Knightsbridge £5.

"Exponential growth" since last year's launch of luxury new-build specialist estate agency Johns & Co has meant the firm has just recruited a batch of new faces, including a key hire from Knight Frank.

You can read LCP's excellent analysis of the new SDLT landscape here, and go deep into all the industry reactions here, but here are a few handy at-a-glance overviews from Keats (third graph) and Chestertons…

The movement from a Stamp Duty slab tax to a graduated tax is a welcome move, says residential fund management outfit LCP on the first day of the new SDLT regime.

"The spike experienced in London at the end of the first quarter has progressively subsided, especially in the prime central London market," says Winkworth in a market outlook statement issued just before…

High-end estate agency Knight Frank has drawn up a map of prime central and prime outer London, complete with price performance stats for each of its office's sales and rentals departments

After George Osborne gave top-end buyers a window of exactly 11 hours and 29 minutes between SDLT reforms being announced and kicking in, there's been reports of estate agencies and law firms turning int…

A bit of a split between around the £1,500 pw mark, but no change overall for prime central London's rental values in November, says Knight Frank, leaving the annual change at +4.4%.

George Osborne rounded off this year's Autumn Statement with "a complete reform" of SDLT (which he called "one of our worst-designed and most damaging of all taxes"), ditching the slab structure in favour…

Most agree that some kind of stamp duty reform needed to happen, and the consensus is generally - although definitely not exclusively - positive