London Trophy Apartment Sells for $24 Million After 26% Discount

(Bloomberg) -- It’s a buyer’s market for trophy homes in central London.

A Mayfair apartment that was once home to part of the Onassis family has been snapped up for 18.6 million pounds ($24.4 million) -- or about 26% below the asking price, according to a statement from Wetherell, the agent that brokered the deal. It took less than 24 hours for the Middle Eastern buyer to agree on the purchase of the property at 47 Grosvenor Square.

Sellers in London’s wealthiest districts are struggling to achieve their desired asking prices after the virus derailed a nascent recovery in the market. Prices were down 1.7% in the three months through July, after falling the most since the global financial crisis in April at the peak of the nationwide lockdown, according to broker Knight Frank.

For a lucky few, that presents an opportunity.

“Ultra-high-net-worth buyers from around the world are currently wanting to acquire trophy properties of this type in Mayfair,” Wetherell founder Peter Wetherell said in the statement.

During the 1960s and 1970s the apartment served as the London home of Artemis Onassis and her husband Theodore Garoufalidis, and was a fashionable social hub for other family members and friends, including Artemis’s shipping-tycoon brother Aristotle and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Once restored to its former glory, the palatial neo-Georgian property -- complete with balcony, multiple reception rooms, five bedrooms, a library and bar -- could be worth up to 30 million pounds, Wetherell estimates.

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