London has run out of billionaires. Somebody should have told the developers.
The capital is littered with expensive apartments that nobody wants to buy. After years of building for the super-rich, London’s property developers have discovered an elementary truth: there aren’t enough of them. It is a triumph of greed over common sense, compounded by an astonishing lack of commercial competence.
There is something magnificently ridiculous about London’s property developers finding themselves sitting on thousands of unsold luxury flats. After years of constructing increasingly extravagant apartments for an apparently limitless supply of the world’s wealthy, they have finally discovered that the supply of billionaires is not, in fact, infinite.
Who could possibly have anticipated that?
According to the Guardian, there are now 1,400 completed but unsold homes in central London’s Zone 1, three times the number in 2016. Construction starts have fallen by 75% over the same period. Across London, thousands more newly built properties are languishing on the market, representing billions of pounds of developers’ money tied up in empty buildings.
The developers are blaming rising construction costs, expensive borrowing, changes in taxation and the retreat of overseas buyers. Apparently, the market has let them down.
No. The market has done precisely what markets do. It has declined to buy products that are too expensive, too plentiful or simply unattractive at the prices being demanded. What we are witnessing is not just the consequence of changing economic circumstances. It is the consequence of two fundamental failures within the development industry: greed and incompetence.
Greed drove developers towards the most lucrative end of the market, where the margins appeared greatest and the rewards most attractive. Incompetence prevented them from recognising the limitations of that market, assessing the risks properly and exercising the commercial restraint that should have accompanied their ambitions.
Perhaps they should have spent less time admiring their architectural models and more time in a supermarket.
There is a reason Tesco has more customers than Waitrose, and Waitrose more than Harrods. It isn’t a complicated economic principle. The more expensive the product, the fewer people can afford it. The higher the price, the smaller the market. And the smaller the market, the greater the risk of running out of customers.
Yet London’s developers have behaved as though the number of people prepared to spend £5m, £10m or more on an apartment is an inexhaustible resource. They have built for oligarchs, international financiers, technology billionaires and people whose wealth is measured in numbers most of us will never encounter. They have provided marble lobbies, private gyms, swimming pools, concierge services, landscaped terraces and spectacular views, all wrapped up in architecture designed to announce that ordinary people need not apply.
Every additional luxury feature offered the prospect of justifying another increase in price. Every increase in price promised another improvement in the developer’s return. The temptation to push the market further became irresistible.
But where was the commercial judgement? Where was the assessment of how many potential customers actually existed? Where was the recognition that even the wealthiest buyers have alternatives and that the international market for luxury property is subject to political, economic and competitive pressures?
Apparently, nowhere that mattered.
The scale of the miscalculation is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise. Research by JLL in May 2026 found that inner London boroughs had 53 months of unsold housing stock, rising to more than ten years in Kensington and Chelsea. Sales of newly built flats priced above £2m had fallen by 76% in 2025 compared with the average for 2016–24.
The Evening Standard reported in August that 4,629 new-build properties remained unsold across London, with an estimated value of £3.5bn. A record.
Savills’ third-quarter research adds another indication of the industry’s predicament. Only 41% of new-build sales in the first half of 2026, excluding build-to-rent, went to individual UK buyers. Bulk sales and transfers into affordable housing accounted for 40%.
In other words, developers are increasingly having to find ways of disposing of properties that their intended customers won’t buy.
This is not a temporary blip in an otherwise healthy market. It is evidence of a business model that has become hopelessly unbalanced.
There will always be a market for luxury property. There will always be people who want a prestigious address, spectacular views and a private gym downstairs. But there is a fundamental difference between there being a market for something and there being a sufficiently large market to support an entire development industry.
Developers appear to have missed that distinction. They saw the prices being achieved during the boom and concluded that the boom was a permanent condition. Rather than questioning whether there were enough customers to sustain the market, they concentrated on extracting the maximum possible value from every square metre.
This was greed. But continuing to commit enormous sums of money to a market whose limitations were becoming increasingly apparent was something else: commercial incompetence.
A business strategy dependent on the continued enthusiasm of a tiny international elite was always going to be vulnerable. Changes in taxation, political conditions and international attitudes towards property investment were hardly unforeseeable events. They were risks that any competent developer should have incorporated into their calculations.
The retreat of overseas buyers should not have come as some inexplicable bolt from the blue. Nor should the possibility that interest rates, taxation or political instability might alter the attractiveness of London property.
These are precisely the factors that professional developers are supposed to understand. They are not amateur speculators placing a few thousand pounds on a horse. They are sophisticated businesses committing hundreds of millions to projects that take years to complete.
Yet the industry seems to have mistaken a rising market for evidence of its own genius. When prices went up, developers congratulated themselves. When demand weakened, they blamed everyone else.
That is not just greed. It is arrogance, and arrogance is a poor substitute for commercial judgement.
The consequences extend well beyond the developers’ balance sheets. Companies have collapsed, projects have been abandoned and construction workers and subcontractors have been left exposed. London Richmond entered administration owing creditors £39m. Ardmore Construction’s collapse left more than £29m owed to creditors and subcontractors. Major developers have shelved schemes and withdrawn from projects.
These are not merely unfortunate accidents. They are the consequences of an industry that has failed to distinguish between building something that can be sold and building something that looks impressive in a sales brochure.
And there is an even more obscene aspect to the whole affair.
London has a housing crisis. People on ordinary incomes cannot afford to buy or rent decent homes. Nurses, teachers, transport workers, shop assistants and young professionals are priced out of the city in which they work. Young people are condemned to years of insecure renting, overcrowding or dependence on their parents.
Meanwhile, expensive apartments stand empty because the handful of people wealthy enough to buy them have decided they would rather spend their money elsewhere.
The industry will doubtless protest that it cannot be expected to provide housing that is commercially unviable. But that is precisely the point. It has spent years concentrating on the most profitable end of the market, apparently oblivious to the fact that a city needs homes for rather more people than the global super-rich.
A housing shortage does not mean there is an unlimited market for any kind of housing at any price. The shortage of affordable homes cannot be solved by building more apartments that only a few hundred people in the world can contemplate buying.
Nor is this simply a question of aesthetics or architectural taste. There is something profoundly wrong with a development model that can produce billions of pounds’ worth of unsold luxury property while failing to meet the basic housing needs of the population. It is a spectacular misallocation of resources, driven by the pursuit of maximum returns and enabled by a failure to understand the market in which those returns were supposed to be realised.
The developers have been greedy enough to pursue the highest possible profits and incompetent enough to believe that the market would accommodate them indefinitely. They have taken risks with other people’s money, other people’s livelihoods and, ultimately, the future of the city.
Developers have spent years telling us that the market determines what gets built. Very well. The market has now delivered its verdict. It doesn’t want as many luxury apartments as they have built.
Perhaps they should listen.
There is no shortage of people who need somewhere to live. There is no shortage of demand for homes that ordinary working people can afford. What there is, apparently, is a shortage of developers capable of recognising the difference between a real housing market and a fantasy populated by people with unlimited money.
Harrods can survive on a relatively small number of extraordinarily wealthy customers. It has no ambition to become Tesco, and Tesco has no ambition to become Harrods. Both understand their markets.
London’s developers, on the other hand, seem to have imagined that the entire capital could become one enormous Harrods, with every apartment a luxury product and every purchaser a millionaire.
Now the shelves are full, the customers have gone home and the owners are wondering what went wrong.
Perhaps the next development brochure should carry a rather different slogan:
Luxury apartments. Unlimited greed. Unlimited ambition. Unfortunately, neither common sense nor customers in sufficient numbers.
It would at least be an honest description of the business model.
Sources and supporting evidence
London’s luxury property oversupply
The following sources support the factual claims and market figures used in the article. The links are provided for checking the original reporting and research.
1. The Guardian — 11 November 2026
Prime property, slow sales: why London’s stock of empty high-end flats is piling up
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/nov/11/property-london-empty-high-end-flats-developers
Principal source for the article. Reports 1,400 completed unsold properties in Zone 1, a 75% reduction in construction starts, and financial difficulties facing developers.
2. JLL — 28 May 2026
Fixing London’s New Homes Market
https://internationalresidential.jll.com.sg/insights/article/fixing-londons-new-homes-market
Market research reporting 53 months of unsold housing stock in inner London and more than ten years in Kensington and Chelsea. It also reports a 76% fall in sales of new flats above £2m in 2025 compared with the 2016–24 average, and 6,325 private-sale home starts in the preceding 12 months, against estimated annual London housing need of 88,000 across all tenures.
3. The Standard — 6 August 2026
Sales of London new build homes plummet: Why is nobody buying them?
https://app.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-new-build-home-sales-houses-property-b1292587.html
Reports Molior figures showing 4,629 unsold new-build properties worth an estimated £3.5bn, and a 37% fall in new-build sales in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025.
4. Savills — Q3 2026
Market in Minutes: Residential Development Land
https://www.savills.com/research_articles/255800/395778-0
Reports that individual UK buyers accounted for 41% of new-build sales in the first half of 2026, while bulk sales and transfers to affordable housing accounted for 40%, up from 22% a year earlier.
5. Savills — 26 October 2026
£10m+ buyers drive London’s super-prime market
A useful counterpoint: the very top of the market remains active, but spending is concentrated among a small number of exceptionally wealthy purchasers. This helps distinguish a functioning niche market from a market large enough to sustain widespread luxury development.