David Adams, managing director of Mayfair-based estate agents John Taylor turns his attention to the health of the London market and what the Greek crisis could mean for property prices at home and abroad.

Why are Central London property prices booming and will this continue?

House prices will continue to rise in central London in the first half of 2012.  There is an investment bubble growing with some unsustainable price rises occurring.  Last week in Mayfair someone who had had an offer accepted at£ 6.5 million was gazumped by an offer of £8.5 million.  So this increase must level out and may fall back if prices continue at the same rate for another year.

There are strong market forces sustaining this price growth.  At the heart of the market, there are too many international buyers and not enough properties to go around.

Why have prices increased?

1. Many of those who make their money trading in stocks and bonds tell me they are now wary of buying over valued stock levels, and so need to divest a percentage of their investment portfolio into bricks and mortar.

2. With interest rates destined to remain at record low levels until 2014 or 2016 it makes sense to buy property, which will also act as an inflation hedge

3.Property in London is a good currency hedge against the Euro.  If the Euro does devalue, or break up, money in pounds sterling in bricks and mortar (not the bank) is a good risk

4. Alternative safe havens against the Euro such as the Swiss franc and gold are horribly overvalued by historic comparison, whereas central London property is only just passing 2007 value levels

5.London presently has a lack of a wealth tax on property compared to many European countries, and while wealth taxes are very much a part of socialist ideology in the Liberal camp, no one believes that a Conservative led coalition would seek to damage London as a destination with such a fundamental change to the tax system.  Not during difficult economic times anyway;

6.Many see London property as a useful investment.

Why is the market outside London so different?

The market in central London is driven by international cash.  With the exception of some small enclaves of interest to international buyers such as Ascot, Sunningdale, the Wentworth Estate, and St Georges Hill, the rest of the English market is reliant on English buyers and their cash.

Sales volumes have been at record lows because there is limited cash and many banks do not what to lend buyers outside of areas of international interest, unless the buyer has substantial equity to offer.

What will happen to the property market if Greece defaults?

A Greek default is already built into the financial market and in my view this needs to occur to allow Greece to recover from a downward spiral.  The risk is whether a Greek default triggers another default elsewhere.

A Greek default would be good for Greeks who presently own London property!  If the new currency devalues by 50% the value of equity in property in London comparatively doubles.  It will instantly become a lot cheaper to buy property in Greece.  More importantly Greece’s tourism industry on which it depends should pick up because it will be cheaper for us to go there.  This should be good for their long term recovery.

What will happen to the property market in England if the Eurozone breaks up as a result of the Greek default triggering a larger sovereign default?

Following the Greek default the Eurozone should continue, but in recession or very low growth for many years.  Worst case scenario is is sovereign defaults, reissuing of currency, and bank failures across Europe, but this is highly unlikely.

Even if the Eurozone did break up, my French colleagues still see central London luxury property as a safe haven against devaluing new European currencies.

Where is the greatest capital gain to be made in property?

The greatest capital gain to be made in property is to buy property which is sought after by an international buyer (which restricts areas in England considerably) and in which the property can be converted to a higher and better use.  For example buying a commercial property at low commercial rates, and gaining planning to convert to residential.  Or buying a leasehold property with a very short lease and extending the lease.

There is little money to be made in refurbishing property without doing something else to increase value, unless you are at the multi million pound end of the market.

What should I do if I need to sell a property, and cant because it isn’t near London or in one of the small country enclaves sought by internationals?

You can convert your property to a higher and better use.  Are you able to add more bedrooms within the existing floor space?  Are you able to add land easily?  Can you extend the lease or gain the freehold?  If you can’t sell or improve, you could rent it out and move into a smaller property within the area that you need to move to.

Which other international markets offer the potential for good capital gain?

The French part of Switzerland, and particularly Geneva is a good bet.  Again the currency is separate from the Euro, as is the pound.  There is more demand for property than there is supply and Geneva is a sought after destination by international buyers because it is a safe haven with good access to other parts of Europe.

The Cote D ‘Azur is also a good bet. Properties with a sea view didn’t drop in price through the last recession.  Limited supply and worldwide demand also helps.

Monaco is also a good investment because there no more room there to build more property which means supply is limited. There is a lot of Eastern European money and non-domiciled English money pouring into property here which has helped Monaco achieve Europe’s highest prices per square foot.

The horses are being prepared, the ground is good to firm and Liverpool’s Aintree Race Course is full with onlookers, betting folk and party goers as the 2012 Grand National fillies and geldings wait to begin.

That will be the scene this Saturday if you are one of the thousands clutching a betting slip at the course – or on the edge of your sofa – and if you win big then we have a house for sale ideal for the recently enriched equine enthusiast.

It’s in Bredons Norton, north of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire and has, as well as a small paddock and stables, a very strong and winning connection to the nation’s favourite horse race.

Because for the last eight years of its life chestnut gelding Royal Athlete (pictured, above), the horse that won the 1995 Grand National, lived after the property’s owners Mr and Mrs Chugg were given the horse after the race by his trainer, Jenny Pitman.

Royal Athlete was a favourite with the betting fraternity, but probably not with the bookies. Entered reluctantly by Pitman after the racing horse’s owners insisted he run, Royal Athlete attracted odds of 40-1 on the day – the 8^th April 1995 and the 145^th Grand National – mainly because he had fallen during an earlier race and was expected to be rested for the Scottish Grand National two weeks later.

When questioned by the BBC’s Des Lynam during a post-race interview Pitman revealed how she had tried to talk Royal Athlete’s owners out of entering him into the race, although it is assumed the £118,854 prize money she picked up helped soften the blow of being overruled.

A brass plaque (pictured) fixed to the front of the property’s stables commemorates Royal Athlete, which aged 12 won its most famous race by seven lengths ridden by 24-year-old Irishman, Jason Titley.

The property is for salt at £625,000 through Hamptons International’s Cheltenham office.

Confirmation has come in today’s budget that the government is to raise stamp duty for homes selling at over £2 million from 5% to 7%.

In an environment of government cost cutting but also tax revenue raising, Chancellor George Osborne still needs to ease the burden for the wider public to stimulate growth. And stamp duty is his political escape route. But how much will it raise?

Of the 610,000 or so recorded house sales in England last year just over 1,600 were for properties sold for £2m or more of which four out of five were in London, netting Mr Osborne approximately £360 million.

The higher rate will bring in another £250-400 million, taking the total tax take to the £600-800m million mark. This is small beer compared to the £110 billion that the government has overspent over the past year or so, but at least the number of £2 million-plus homes being sold is on the increase, providing Osborne with some hope.

Wildwood in Hampstead: For sale at £18.75m with agent Glentree International. The property could soon cost its buyer £1.31m in stamp duty.

In 2010 some 1,550 homes worth £2 million or more were sold, rising to £1,610 last year while the number of overall house purchases dropped over the same period, by 22,721 to 642,230 a year.

So it’s all down to politics. If Osborne really wanted to squeeze significant tax revenue out of the property market then increased stamp duty lower down the price bands would be more logical, although less popular.

Revenues on properties selling for between £250,000 and £1 million (3% and 4% duty respectively) account for 79% of the chancellor’s stamp duty revenue, research by lender the Halifax revealed recently. London and the South East also account for almost three quarters of all the tax’s revenue – so put the two together and you have basically the rump of the Conservative voter base, a group Mr Osborne wouldn’t want to upset.

But most experts think the extra duty is unlikely to inflict any long term damage on the prime property market.

“An additional stamp duty burden will freeze the market for at least three months, but eventually reality and acceptance would set in,” says James Geddes of Private Property Search. “Prices would also drop around the £2m mark as those currently advertising their homes for just over that drop their prices to slip their property under the stamp duty threshold.”

Miles Meacock of agent Strutt & Parker, says: “There will be a hiatus surrounding this daunting new tax bracket but that I think it will be highly unlikely our market will take a hammering.

“The London market is swelled by foreign investment, many of whom want to invest in Central London whatever the tax implications and with Italy’s comparable tax, for example, set at 10%, London should still seem a slightly less painful investment option.”

The TV spy thriller series The Avengers was one of Britain’s longest running small screen shows broadcast as one-hour episodes between 1961 and 1969 and also during its revival in the 1970s.  And it made global stars of its main characters including John Steed (Patrick Macnee), Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) and Purdey (Joanna Lumley).

But the series was also beloved by millions for its setting – the prettier vistas, streets and roads of swinging 1960s London. And if you should wish to relive many scenes from The Avengers, and its later incarnation The New Avengers then pop down to Ennismore Garden Mews in Knightsbridge, London and have a look at No.21 – a two bedroom mews property for sale used on multiple occasions as a location for the series.

Another mews house, No.3 Stable Mews (around the corner) was also used for filming, mainly as the home of John Steed. Also, many other roads around Ennismore Garden Mews, including Rutland Mews South and East and Cleveland Mews, made an appearance in the film.

And The Avengers wasn’t alone in using Ennismore Garden Mews – it also featured in several episodes of The Professionals and HJ Wells The Invisible Man.

Today No.21 is owned by entrepreneur, business advisor and Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year finalist Christianne Wuillamie who is asking £2.75m for the house – which comes with planning permission to be extended with a conservatory at the back within its courtyard garden.

The properties that make Britain great are to be found all over the UK. Cue wisteria choked-cottages, sharp-shouldered rectories, ship-size Georgian mansions and teetering townhouses, all designed grandly and all probably once featured in Country Life magazine.

These architectural clichés are hard coded into our national psyche and by comparison Americans are mostly bereft of anything old, Australians have to do with identical modern neighbours and the French hate their drafty old chateaux and prefer new build bungalows.

But is that true – what homes do we British really have the property hots for? After trawling through the million or so properties listed on our site for sale and rent and looking at search patterns among our two and a half million users, all can be revealed.

A majority of us, our research shows, seek a detached property with a large garden in the heart of walking country and overlooking beautiful countryside. As Kirstie and Phil would say, such a tick list is not easy to fill.

Properties like the one pictured below are not even one to the dozen. So it’s no surprise that they are hugely in demand and are twice the national average house price (or £523,866 to be exact).

Britain's most desired home? This 18th/19th century stone farmhouse outside Avonbridge in Falkirk has outstanding views over the local countryside and comes with part ownership of a local nature reserve.

But the main truth our research has revealed is just how much we are nation of urban and suburban dwellers which pines for the countryside. It’s why programmes such as Kirstie Allsopp’s Homemade Home, which sells the satin-quilted bucolic dream, or Escape to the Country, are so popular.

Some 90% of us live in cities and more than half (57%) surveyed in the PrimeLocation.com Desirability Index said their dream house would be detached, in the countryside (33%), have good views (64%) and be near nice places to walk (44%).

Thousands of children across the UK strive to earn a bit of pocket money in their spare time to buy video games, sweets or maybe fund a mobile phone.

But nine-year-old Keiron Williamson from the village of Ludham in North Norfolk has taken this to a new level. He’s earned enough money to buy a large, detached house for his family to move into.

Until March this year Keiron, his parents Keith and Michelle plus sister Billie (pictured, below) lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in the village opposite a petrol station.

Photos: Albanpix / Rex Features

But Keiron’s extraordinary painting talents, which brought him fame two years ago after his watercolours of the local landscape first came to public notice, have now begun to earn him enough money for the family to buy a £150,000 house in the village, Old Post Office Cottage.

The latest exhibition of Keiron’s paintings attracted global interest, earning ‘mini Monet’ as he is called locally, a further £106,260 after his latest 12 paintings sold out in just ten minutes. To date the child artist has successfully sold 89 paintings in five exhibitions – with all of his shows being sell outs.

Photos Albanpix / Rex Features

At the latest show held last month the most expensive of the works on offer was a £15,595 painting of Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, which Kieron painted based on photos from the internet.

His work first came on the market in 2009 when 19 of his paintings were sold for £14,000 in a sealed-bid auction.

In August last year, 33 of his creations sold for £150,000 in less than 30 minutes – and it is this money that bought them their new home.

The house at 498 Finchley Road in North London may look like just another suburban mini mansion but its striking facade and neo-Georgian stonework (pictured below)  hide a simple but unusual fact.

It is the first time this property has come on to the market for nearly half century and, despite the intervening decades, it’s the same agent selling the house today as did in 1966.

Leaf through the yellowed pages of the original brochure (pictured, bottom) and it feels like a different world rather than a different decade. Nothing is swinging or fab in the formal sales brochure (unlike the current one’s more relaxed approach) although the 1966 property market was fairly ‘radical’ compared to today’s.

That year’s average house price was £3,465 and values were rising by 6% a year. Today it’s £219,533 rising by just 0.9%.

But what’s changed most dramatically is the way homes are sold. We all take it for granted that property is bought on the open market by ‘private treaty’ using estate agents, but back then most were sold at auctions instead, and most ‘estate agents’ were in fact auctioneers.

“In 1966 it might have been advertised in a magazine but more likely it was marketed by hand written letters being sent out to potential buyers prior to an auction at a local pub – Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead – which in fact is now a block of flats,” says Phillip Green of local estate agent Goldschmidt & Howland.

But what has changed most is the Finchley Road, which has been transformed from a quiet thoroughfare into a busy main road clogged up these days by traffic from central London travelling to the bottom of the M1.

“In those days you were lucky if a family had one car but now it’s normal for them to have two or three around here,” says Phillip Green.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the property’s interior, which has been preserved in aspic since Goldschmidt & Howland last photographed it – most noticeably the beehive yellow parquet flooring, original cornicing and light fittings.

For more information phone Goldschmidt & Howland on 020 8209 9300.

The heady days of buyers queuing outside new developments armed with deposits and desperate to part with their cash are over, or so we’re lead to believe. But the launch of a recent central London development suggests it still carries on, albeit rarely.

Over 1,900 buyers registered interest for Central Square’s 170 new apartments in the capital’s edgy Clerkenwell, walking distance from the Square Mile, so we thought the launch party last week might be busy. When the doors opened at 5pm in rushed a flurry of buyers who, despite previously registering interest, had not been allowed to buy until then.

Between wine, canapés and viewings the prospective buyers – of all ages and nationalities – quizzed the selling agents. Then like the bear pit of a Wall Street trading floor, they started to buy. With two-bedroom apartments starting at £575,000 this is not a purchase to be bought in a hurry, but a buzz of chatter on the phones to banks or loved ones ensued and deposits of £2,000 per reservation were paid on credit cards.

By 9pm, 37 apartments were already reserved and over a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc we quizzed the Chief Executive of Mount Anvil, Killian Hurley, about the success of their latest launch.

Hurley said one of his tricks is to spend more on the finish, which means investing more in the product, but they sell faster. “You’ll notice when you go to look around the show apartments,” he told us. And we did. Every apartment has at least one balcony, the kitchens and bathrooms exuded high quality and we loved the heated wall and towel rail in the bathroom as well as the floor-to-ceiling windows which add to the sense of space.

And, unlike many new apartments, there’s plenty of storage space and built-in wardrobes. In the two bedroom flat there is a huge open plan living and entertaining space adjoining a large decked terrace and we were surprised at the decent size of the second bedroom.

So it is easy to see why these homes are flying off the shelves. And at £400,000 for one bedroom and £575,000 for two, these are not marketed at the wealthy City bankers looking to spend their bonuses. These pads are being snapped up by young professionals, often working in finance in the City (but not at the bonus level), looking for a trendy place near work.

Central is the operative word in Central Square; it’s within 14 minutes walk to St Pauls, Shoreditch and Liverpool Street. Brian De’ath, the sales director told us that the international buyers often aren’t used to commuting so it’s important for them to walk to work. It’s no wonder then that the development’s marketing slogan is “Unexpectedly close by. Hit snooze then stroll into the office”.

To give you more of a sense of its location, here’s a fun clip of the Kit Kat advert which was filmed in the building site of Central Square – look at the skyline, the building taking shape and its location.

And if you want to reserve an apartment at Central Square you’d better be quick.

Dragon’s Den star Hilary Devey is selling up her Staffordshire home for £2.2 million, saying filming commitments for the hit BBC2 series prevent her spending much time at the property.

Devey, who is a publican’s daughter from Bolton, is the ninth dragon to join the programme and made her fortune in the world of freight distribution with a company she founded in 1996. Her personal style and tastes, though, are a world away from fork lift trucks and rumbling HGVs, particularly when choosing places to live.

The twice-divorced 52-year-old has been spending less and less time at at her home at Rangemore Hall, a large early-19^th century pile to the west of Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire in opulent surroundings that reportedly include a chandelier in the kitchen. She also owns an apartment in London as well as villas in Morocco and Spain.

Rangemore Hall, of which Devey occupies the largest wing, was built in the 1850s by the Bass brewing family to replace an earlier but smaller structure. An additional and Italianate wing was added during the late 1890s to accommodate King Edward VII, who paid a visit in 1902 and it’s this that Devey owns. She bought the property 2007 and has described it as being “over the top, like me”.

If this sounds up your tree lined drive and you fancy discussing the latest Dragon’s Den episode with your neighbour then Rangemore Hall’s Ewing Wing is up for sale at £895,000 and offers the sort of glamorous interior style (pictured, above) and views of the surrounding countryside as Devey’s home.

Which towns in the UK are the most affluent? One indicator is the proportion of million pound homes locally – and we’ve compiled the top 100. See below for the full list – is your town on it?