Housebuilder offers to pay buyers’ private school fees

A housebuilder is offering to pay buyers over £40,000 in private school fees for every home sold as developers battle a stagnant London property market.

Berkeley Group has offered to cover up to two years of tuition fees at St John’s Preparatory and Senior School for buyers at its Trent Park housing estate in Enfield, north London.

The fees range from £4,500 a term for pre-prep pupils to £5,800 per term for children aged 11 and over at the senior school, meaning the offer could save buyers up to £41,750 on private education costs, including VAT.

The Trent Park properties start at around £760,000 for a one-bed and cost up to £1.8m for a five-bedroom property. They are set within a 413-acre country park and include landscaped gardens.

Berkeley’s offer to pay private school fees is just one of a series of unconventional perks being offered to prospective buyers, according to property search website Ldn.one, as developers struggle to shift newly built homes.

Some buyers are now being offered a year of council tax or service charges paid on their behalf, according to Ldn.one.

Others are being offered rate discounts and full home part-exchange schemes, which allow people to trade existing homes directly with a housebuilder that acts as a cash buyer.

Developers have also included gifts such as a free Polestar 2 car, worth £44,000, consultations with interior designers and e-bikes, The i Paper reported in January.

New-builds sit empty

A record number of new-build homes in London have gone unsold in recent months, according to analysts at Molior, with billions of pounds’ worth of recently completed properties sitting empty.

Molior’s data show 4,629 recently completed homes in London failed to find a buyer during the second quarter of this year. Work on another 2,704 homes was halted with them only partly built.

Average selling prices in London dropped by 3.7pc in the year to May, the steepest fall since 2023. In parts of central London, prices fell by as much as 23pc.

Housing developers are cutting prices by 8pc on average. Some have taken to offering discounts worth as much as 30pc, once price reductions and incentives are combined, amid collapsing demand for new-build homes.

Daniel Taylor, the co-founder of Ldn.one, said: “They are hanging every little goodie on the tree.”

Newly built homes in Canary Wharf, Wandsworth and Camden have seen an average of £200,000 knocked from their asking prices.

Demand from prospective home purchasers has weakened as persistently high mortgage rates have eroded affordability.

Developers have also been grappling with the abolition of Help to Buy, higher stamp duty surcharges for buyers and the end of the non-dom tax regime, all of which have shrunk the pool of potential buyers.

The collapse in sales has threatened to undermine Labour’s manifesto pledge to build 1.5 million new homes during this parliament.

Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, admitted last weekend that it was “a really difficult stretch target”.

Andy Burnham has promised to launch the largest council house building drive in decades.

Berkeley Group declined to comment.