Yahoo Finance It’s not a typo: room in west London flatshare advertised for £3,800pcm, four times local average
Could this super-pricey room in Bayswater be London’s swankiest flatshare?
A woman has advertised a room in her two-bedroom Lancaster Gate apartment for £3,800 per month on SpareRoom – almost four times the average price of a room in the area.
The flat owner, an “aesthetic doctor” who travels regularly, wrote in the listing: “I have a two-bed luxury flat with pool, gym, sauna etc. I was thinking to share my flat with a person – either a professional or student.”
Unfortunately, £3,800pcm does not buy you privacy. Tenants will have to share the communal areas with their new flatmate — although the room has an en suite, so luckily there will be no queuing for the shower.
There is, however, access to the gym, pool and spa facilities at the property, which also has a garden, concierge and central location bordering Hyde Park. Bills are also included in the price — a perk not to be sniffed at as energy bills rise.
The apartment is in The Lancasters, a £100 million development of 77 apartments set within a Grade II-listed, stucco-fronted building overlooking Kensington Gardens.
Two-bedroom flats like this one offer between 1,050 and 1,400sq ft of space, and were priced from £2.4million upwards at their launch in 2011.
A three-bedroom, second floor apartment with views over Hyde Park is currently the most expensive property for sale in the development, priced at £8.95 million.
At £3,800 per month, however, the room is almost four times the average (£1,017) in the postcode, according to SpareRoom, and £1,340 more than an entire property costs to rent in London, on average.
Indeed, the annual spend on rent for the room of £45,600 amounts to more than the average deposit in Britain, which currently sits at £44,750.
On Lancaster Gate alone, there are several whole apartments currently available to rent for a substantially lower price.
A spokesperson from SpareRoom said: "These kinds of ads are incredibly rare on SpareRoom, when we do occasionally come across prices like this they are usually the result of a typo!
“This ad is definitely one of the more expensive flatshare set ups we’ve ever seen. W2 is one of the most expensive areas in London, but this ad is still over three times the average rent for a room there.”
The area is, of course, notoriously expensive. Last year, a 6,800sq ft penthouse apartment in the nearby Park Modern development was thought to be the priciest flat for sale in London, while a studio so small that only a bunk bed would fit in it was recently advertised to rent for £1,200pcm on Wrights Lane, Kensington.
Interested in the flatshare? You’ll need to be single, able to rent for at least six months (at a cost of £22,800) and, bizarrely, under the age of 41.
