London house prices: record £80m mortgage taken out on flat

Property tycoon Nick Candy has taken out an £80m mortgage on his luxury One Hyde Park apartment in London.

The loan, secured from banking company Credit Suisse, is understood to be one of the largest ever taken out on a property in the UK, says the Daily Mail.

Last week it was reported that the British billionaire had sold the Knightsbridge penthouse to a “mystery buyer” for £160m, making it Britain’s most expensive apartment. But The Times has revealed that Candy was actually restructuring the ownership, selling the property to a company that he controls in order to refinance it with the loan, after moving to a new home in Chelsea with his wife, actress Holly Valance.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Times suggests that the refinancing has been “taken as a renewed sign of confidence in London’s super prime housing market”.

A senior city source said: “The market has been so depressed since 2014 that there haven’t been any transactions of anywhere near that value.”

Candy developed the One Hyde Park block with his brother, Christian, and has owned the penthouse since the project was completed, in 2009.

Occupying the top two floors of the famous London development, the apartment comes with “two wine cellars, two underground parking spaces and balconies overlooking the park”, according to The Guardian.

“The £160m recorded price exceeds the previous UK house price sale record of £140m for Park Place, a stately home near Henley-on-Thames, which was bought by Russian exile billionaire Andrey Borodin in 2011,” the newspaper adds.

A spokesperson for Candy Capital said: “I can confirm that this is indeed a refinancing rather than a sale, but I am not able to comment any further.”