Property for sale in Kensington

The market today

400 sales across 106 streets in Kensington have been registered with HM Land Registry in the current dataset. The largest single group is flats and maisonettes, with a median of £1.17m and recorded prices between £297,500 and £14.14m. Flat to modestly firmer over the last year, with best-in-class houses outperforming compromised stock by a wide margin.

What the housing stock looks like

• flats and maisonettes — 263 registered sales, median £1.17m
• terraced houses — 69 registered sales, median £3.77m
• other property — 32 registered sales, median £2.25m
• semi-detached houses — 7 registered sales, median £5.83m

Living here

Kensington is the steadiest part of our patch. Buyers arrive knowing exactly what they want — a lateral flat on Campden Hill, a stucco house behind Kensington Church Street, or a mansion-block apartment with a porter and a lift — and they rarely change their minds. Supply is the constraint, not demand: the Royal Borough grants few consents, garden squares are held privately, and the same forty or fifty houses circulate slowly between long-term owners. That makes pricing unusually literal here. A house with a proper garden and no lease worries clears within weeks; the same house with a compromise on light or a short lease can sit for a season. As an estate agent in Kensington we spend most of our time on the two weeks before launch — the survey, the lease, the photography brief — because in W8 the market punishes an unprepared listing more than an ambitious price.

Green space and getting about

Kensington sits in W8 and W14 and SW7, and buyers almost always weigh three things before price: how far the nearest park or garden square is, which station they will use every morning, and whether the street is quiet at the weekend. We walk those three before quoting a figure, because they move a valuation more than square footage does.