"Uber-prime" real estate still hot in London

Purchases continue to make headlines - in July, developer Marcus Cooper sold London's second biggest house - a 25-bedroom mansion dwarfed only by Buckingham Palace - to an undisclosed buyer for 50 million pounds, almost twice the price paid last year.

"There has been a dramatic change. What we are seeing is a very limited supply of houses and people who come into the market happy to spend 20, 50, 100 million pounds," said Jonathan Hewlett, Savills' director for top-end London sales.

"They find it mind-blowing that they can't find anything."

CASH IS KING

Demand for the lower end of the prime market has historically come from London's City, but that has slowed as both the economy and bankers' bonus expectations cool.

"I would buy a flat now if I had the cash. Everything depends on my bonus," said one London banker hoping to buy a property above the million-pound mark, who declined to be identified.

"Nobody knows what their bonus will be like or what will happen to their job. Some people do not expect any bonus and given that the previous bonuses were paid in shares, there is a reduction in spendable money all round."

Instead, the demand for top-end, lavish homes is almost exclusively foreign, agents say, citing Russian, but also Indian and Middle Eastern buyers. They report only a handful of British bidders, many of them families who have agreed to sell their super-homes in the face of attractive offers.

Besides being undeterred by slowing financial markets, buyers with commodity-driven fortunes are also untouched by a collapse in mortgage offers which has frozen out first-time buyers and curbed the spending power of average Britons seeking to upgrade.

The majority of sales at the very high end are for cash, occasionally backed by loans using existing assets as collateral or with private banks.