Nearly two-thirds of homes are empty in London‘s millionaire playgrounds, analysis suggests.
In Mayfair’s exclusive Curzon Street neighbourhood – littered with plush apartments and mansions that sell for north of £10million – just 696 dwellings were occupied out of 1,980, according to the most up-to-date Government estimate.
Similarly high rates of empty homes were seen in streets within a stone’s throw from Wembley Stadium and Marble Arch, as well as in the coastal towns of Salcombe and St Ives, the Daily Mail found.
Because of the way officials collect the occupancy statistics, many vacant dwellings will actually be short-term lets or second homes. Others will classed as ‘truly vacant’.
Townhouses lie empty across one of the capital’s richest areas (there is no suggestion that this home in Mayfair’s Curzon Street neighbourhood is empty)
Sprawling coastal properties in Salcombe are often snapped up as second homes (there is no suggestion that this property is vacant)
In England, 1.5m dwellings – a category which covers everything from mobile homes to seven-storey mansions – were marked as unoccupied in March 2021.
That equated to 6.1% of all homes, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the Census.
Armed with the ONS figures, we plotted the occupied/vacant homes estimates for all 35,000 lower super output areas (LSOA) in England and Wales.
These tiny neighbourhoods, consisting of between 1,000 and 3,000 people, provide astonishingly detailed insights into pockets of the country.
Behind Mayfair’s Curzon Street neighbourhood, technically called Westminster 018D (64.9%), came in Brent 035D – the pocket encompassing and surrounding Wembley Stadium (63.6%).
Westminster 011E, which stretches around Marble Arch and down Park Lane, ranked third (59.1%).
Outside of the capital, the LSOA with the highest unoccupancy rates was South Hams 012B, which encompasses much of the affluent Devon town of Salcombe – a known second home paradise for the wealthy.
There, 57.9 per cent of homes were categorised as empty in March 2021.
St Ives in Cornwall, another expensive coastal property haven with high second home ownership rates, ranked seventh in our analysis (57.1 per cent) while the area between Hunstanton and Wells-next-the-sea in Norfolk came tenth (55.4 per cent).
At the other end of the scale, a section of Stourbridge, known as Dudley 031C, had the lowest rate of empty homes, with just one dwelling out of 548 (0.2 per cent) being deemed unoccupied.
Separate Government data, reflecting the situation in 2024, suggested that 700,000 homes were empty across England.
Around 265,000 of these were ‘long-term’ vacant, a separate Mail analysis revealed earlier this year, with Labour urged to convert them to tackle the housing shortage, which has priced millions of Brits out of owning their own homes and made rents rocket.
Campaigners say they could be repurposed as ‘genuinely affordable homes’, or be used as temporary accommodation.
For a home to be officially classed as ‘long-term empty’, it has to be liable for council tax, unfurnished, and no one has lived in it for over six months.
Yet Kyle Dunn, founder of property advisory firm Commercial Mortgage Guide, told the Daily Mail that, even if Labour immediately released tens of thousands of homes onto the market tomorrow, it wouldn’t immediately solve the issue.
He said: ‘Housing demand isn’t uniform and people want to live where there are jobs, schools, and transport links.
‘In those areas, even modest homes are snapped up quickly, while elsewhere stock languishes.’
Mr Dunn said this explained why leafy parts of London had the highest unoccupancy figures.
He added: ‘Many of these empty properties are concentrated in areas where demand doesn’t match supply, often in urban centres with a glut of high-end properties aimed at investors rather than local buyers.
‘Developers have built heavily in the luxury segment.
‘But that doesn’t solve the shortage of affordable family homes in commuter belts and regional towns.’
Commentators have often cited this dearth of property as a viable solution to London’s housing crisis, with record high rough sleeping numbers and councils dropping millions per day on temporary accommodations.
But the independent research organisation, Centre for Cities, recently said that the numbers do not accurately represent the opportunity that policy hawks claim. The body explained in a May 2025 paper that the Census figures show only that the property was vacant on that day in March 2021, when the pandemic was still raging.
The independent research body Centre for Cities added that not only are there fewer empty homes with the potential to become primary residences, but empty homes are a finite resource that will barely scratch the surface of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s £20billion target of 880,000 new homes by 2035.
The Action on Empty Homes campaign group says getting empty properties back in circulation is better than building new homes as it saves on land and avoids wasting carbon, helping to combat climate change.
However many of the long-term vacant homes are old, in need of investment and are nowhere near ready to be lived in.
Homes can also sit empty for other reasons. For instance, there may be a feud within a family after an owner has died because one relative doesn’t want another to benefit from any sale.
Councils already have extensive tools to bring empty homes back into use.
They can charge anywhere between 50 per cent to 300 per cent extra on council tax bills for homes left empty for more than two years.
Local authorities can get funding through the Affordable Homes Programme to help bring homes back into use. As a last resort, councils can use a Compulsory Purchase Order to buy a property without the owner’s permission.
But even bringing all long-term vacant homes back into circulation wouldn’t be enough to turn the ship around.
Labour aims to build 1.5million homes within five years, which averages to 300,000 new homes per year.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to bulldoze ‘NIMBY’ objections to build on the green belt to meet the targets – promises branded ‘unrealistic’ by members of his own party.
In a bid to find a solution to housing migrants arriving to the UK, the Government is also proposing pilot schemes where it could pay local authorities to buy or renovate property, which they would lease back to the Home Office to house asylum seekers.
As well as being a waste of resources, long-term empties can also become an issue for those in the local community.
Organised criminal gangs have seized empty homes to farm cannabis, unbeknownst to the owner. Teenage tearaways have also been known to break into them.
Locals might move out to avoid the problems, which can then have a knock-on effect on businesses that might struggle to survive without the custom.
