If anyone ought to know how to scale the property ladder, it’s an estate agent, surely. It must be a badge of honour, having honed your skills in the property marketplace over many years, to acquire for yourself one of those desirable residences in a sought-after location.

Most estate agents begin their buying life much like the rest of us, without privilege or private income. However, they learn to property hunt, to stalk up-and-coming areas for a bargain, and — with a bit of good fortune, a willingness to take a risk and the knowledge of how to do a good refurb — many eventually reach the top of the property market.

Here’s how three of them did it.

Shaun Macnamara, 34
Shaun is an associate director at CBRE, and his wife, Hanni, works in product development for a fashion company.

Start: a one-bedroom ex-council flat in Bethnal Green.
Finish: a smart two-bedroom period house in Victoria Park Village in east London, plus a buy-to-let flat.
Time taken: seven years.

In 2006 Shaun and Hanni spent £140,000 on an ex-local authority flat in Bethnal Green. Ideally they would have lived in Shoreditch but since they were priced out they opted for a cheaper neighbouring area, hoping the Shoreditch effect would ripple out —which it has.

Renovating the flat cost about £10,000. The couple did much of the work themselves and stuck to a strict budget, careful not to overspend on things such as kitchen units and tiles. They had seen renovations and knew what mattered to a sale.

Thanks to their hard work and a rising market, by 2007 the flat was worth £225,000 which meant they were able to remortgage. This helped them raise a deposit for a one-bedroom period conversion with a garden for their dog, in a nearby road. So they moved and rented out their ex-council home.

Then the property market crashed, leaving the couple with two mortgages. “We were quite nervous about whether we had done the right thing but fortunately we never had any void periods on the flat, which we let at £200 a week so it covered our mortage. We were all right,” says Shaun.

The couple married in 2011 and the following year, with the market picking up again, they moved once more, spending £370,000 on their current home.

They have since spent £60,000 on refurbishing it. “We do think it has gone up in value — some friends of ours recently moved in across the road and they paid £525,000 for a similar house which needs work,” says Shaun.

His advice to others climbing the ladder is to buy somewhere they will enjoy living in, rather than treating house buying as simply an investment exercise.

“We know this area will never be Mayfair, it will always be rough around the edges, but that is why we like it,” he says.

“And there is still property, so we can move and improve.”
FOLLOW THE SIMPLE RULES:

• If you are willing to renovate you will add value — but don’t chuck out original windows or period fireplaces.
• Buy quality but do not overspend on crazily priced fixtures and fittings.
• Take a DIY course and do as much as you can yourself.
• Neutral décor appeals to most prospective buyers.
• Choose your dream location and buy on its fringe — and hope the ripple effect will send up the price.
• Look in areas with run-down period homes ripe for gentrification, where good transport links are planned or already in place.
• A flat with its own entrance always appeals to buyers. Communal halls and passages can be dull and depressing and there may not be much you can do about them.
• Basements, top floors without lifts and high service charges put people off, so avoid these when buying.

James Wyatt, 48
James is a partner at Virginia Water-based estate agents Barton Wyatt, and his wife Jane, 47, is a full-time mother to their three children aged 13, 11 and nine.

Start: a two-bedroom “box” on a housing estate in Bracknell, Berkshire, bought when James started work in 1987. The property cost £62,000.
Finish: a £6 million house on the Wentworth Estate, plus a four-bedroom buy-to-let house, both in Virginia Water, Surrey.
Time taken: 27 years.

While James’s ascent might seem spectacular it has been earned by regular house moves and a willingness to self-build and take on debt.

He bought his first home at 21, only needing a five per cent deposit to get a mortgage, a process that was at the time “terribly easy”.

Within a year, however, he was fed up with commuting and decided to buy a flat in Virginia Water with his brother. He sold the Bracknell property for £77,000, and put the money into an £80,000 two-bedroom flat.

The property was run-down and the brothers invested around £6,000 in upgrading it, confident of turning a great profit. Then the market crashed and when they sold the property in 1991 they only raised £88,000 leaving James “bust”. He went to live with his parents to retrench.

In 1994, he got engaged to Jane and bought a penthouse flat in a converted Victorian brewery in Staines, breaking rules by buying the best property in the worst area rather than vice versa. “I really thought I had made it,” he says. The flat cost £125,000.

By 1997 he had itchy feet once more. His grandmother died and left him a small sum of money but enough to encourage him to remortgage again and buy a three-bedroom house on a gated estate in Virginia Water for £250,000.

“The market was really motoring by then,” says James, who sold the flat two years later, in 1999, for £395,000. This allowed the couple to buy a townhouse, also in Virginia Water, for £495,000.

“It was double the size of the other place but because interest rates were coming down so much at the time the mortgage didn’t actually cost me any more — it was a fantastic move,” James says.

The favourable mortgage conditions meant that in 2000 he “kept on borrowing” to purchase a four-bedroom buy-to-let property in Virginia Water.

A year later, James took another chance and bought a plot of land on the upmarket Wentworth Estate for £750,000. He funded this by selling the townhouse for £780,000 while the market was “really flying”, and he and Jane moved into a rented property while they applied for planning permission to build a 5,000sq ft detached house on the site. It involved both disruption and a gamble but even though he’d had his fingers burnt once, James felt he could now cover the risk.

By then they had a young family and were able to move into their new home, built at a cost of around £750,000, in 2002. Most people would have been content to stop there but in 2005 the family was on the move again, this time to a “rotten” Sixties house on the estate. They sold their self-built house for £2.2 million and moved into the new property while they drew up plans to knock it down and rebuild.

The build was carried out during 2008 and 2009 — they lived in their buy-to-let house for the duration — and the result is a huge, 9,000sq ft family home with seven bedrooms and an annexe, valued at an estimated  £6 million.

James is keen to point out that although they enjoyed favourable market conditions, he and Jane have “been through it” with their risk taking, always being on the move and living in rental homes while work was done. “I run a small estate agents and you are never going to make a fortune doing that,” he says.

“A great way to make money is to buy property, or build your own, but it is never guaranteed. After the Virginia Water flat I bought with my brother I was completely bust but I kept on going.”

Spencer Lawrence, 39
Spencer is a director of London-based Paramount Lettings, and his wife Francesca, 40, is a full-time mother to Sadie, nine, Otto, seven, and Freddie, four.

Start: a two-bedroom Acton flat bought for £166,000.
Finish: a four-bedroom family house in Ealing, worth £1.5 million, plus a one-bedroom rental flat in Kilburn worth £300,000.
Time taken: 16 years.

When Francesca met Spencer, she had a two-bedroom flat in Acton which she’d bought for £166,000, while he had a £106,000 one-bedroom flat in Kilburn. They moved into Francesca’s larger flat, taking in a friend as a lodger to help pay the mortgage, and rented out the Kilburn property.

The couple saved hard and in 2003 heard about a three-bedroom flat in West Hampstead, where Spencer works. It was a probate property and in a terrible state. But, crucially, it was cheap for the area at £280,000. They snapped it up, although the purchase was a stretch since they sold the Acton property for £220,000.

West Hampstead is a hugely desirable area and the couple had a big advantage, in that Spencer’s father is a builder and rebuilt the flat at cost price of £40,000 over the next six months.

However, once Sadie was 13 months old, and with Otto on the way, they were fed up with wrestling baby buggy and a toddler up and down stairs, while lack of family space was a nightmare, and another worry was on the horizon — the quality of the local schools.

They made a fine profit on their flat, which they sold for £510,000 and started looking in Ealing where schools were good. They bought a four-bedroom semi for £680,000 and spent £300,000 extending into the loft and the garden. “We now have the home we want, and when we downsize there should be a bit over for a pension.

“We did the right thing getting on the property ladder as soon as possible. Like so many people our needs changed and we were pushed on from being a young couple to becoming parents wanting space for a family. And we got there.”

Politicians are taking a stand over pre-selling property to foreign investors. A new industry code will put home-grown buyers back at the top of the developers’ lists.

Londoners are being offered first bite of the cherry with a fresh crop of new home projects, as developers step back from initially launching schemes abroad to foreign buyers who are keen to invest in the capital.

“Pre-selling” to foreign buyers has become a hot issue, with Lib-Dem MP Simon Hughes leading a campaign to stop the practice. He argues that the trend pushes up prices, prevents Londoners buying homes, and creates “ghost” developments with empty apartments owned by absentee landlords buying for investment.

Savills estimates that 75 per cent of private new homes in central London were snapped up by foreign buyers in 2012/13. From April next year, foreign owners will have to pay capital gains tax on any profits, but this is unlikely to dent demand from international buyers, as London property remains such a good investment bet.

Fearing tighter controls on foreign investors after the next general election, developers are going on a charm offensive with London buyers and have signed up to an industry code pledging to market all new homes in the UK before, or at least at the same time, as going overseas. Mayor of London Boris Johnson has welcomed the move.

“While overseas investment is a necessary part of any global city’s housing market, it is right that Londoners are not disadvantaged and new homes are made available to them at the outset,” he says. Barratt, Crest Nicholson, Galliard, Fairview, Redrow, Taylor Wimpey, Telford and Lend Lease are the big-name developers who have signed up to the code.

Smaller builders and niche developers are also focusing on London buyers — and why wouldn’t they, says Carl Schmid of east London estate agent Fyfe Mcdade. “The market is red hot with domestic buyers and likely to remain that way for at least the rest of this year.”

In today’s cost-conscious climate, homebuyers want best possible value for money and are searching for areas that are up and coming. For their part, developers are investing in outstanding architecture and pushing interior design, “that captures buyers’ imagination”.

New homes are in short supply, particularly finished properties, which is driving buyers towards  off-plan deals up to three years ahead of completion.

For anyone who may have doubted that the UK property market had turned a corner, latest numbers from Land Registry provide further proof for estate agents and buyers and sellers alike.

Its December House Price Index shows an annual price increase of 4.4 per cent which takes the average property value in England and Wales to £167,353.

The monthly change from November to December shows an increase of 1.1 per cent. Repossession volumes decreased by 31 per cent in October 2013 to 1,129 compared with 1,636 in October 2012.

However, once again it appears that London might be skewing the numbers.

Not only was it the location for the most expensive sale – a property for £15 million, London was also the region in England and Wales which experienced the greatest increase in its average property value over the last 12 months with a movement of 11.2 per cent.

London also experienced the greatest monthly rise with a movement of 2.6 per cent.

The only region with an annual price fall was the North East with a decrease of 0.1 per cent.

HAPPY NEW YEAR. May the year of the horse bring you prosperity.

This week has been a busy one for Property Inside London. Despite being a small and specialist team we have sold four properties, are in negotiations on others and have made offers on five properties for property search clients as well as renting four properties. This is on top of completing the sale of other properties.

We are delighted to announce that we have now agreed to start advertising client properties ourselves on ZOOPLA which also gives us advertising on many other media including PRIMELOCATION, THE TIMES, THE SUNDAY TIMES and THE INDEPENDENT. This complements our existing marketing strategy allowing us to provide clients with an even better service.

New properties that we have taken on this week include a lovely two bed apartment in the Corniche on the South Bank. The development completes in 2017. The asking price is £1.18m. We are continually looking for good quality properties to sell to our database of active investors, both completed units and off plan properties. This includes properties that are currently rented. We believe our service stands out from the rest.

More than 200 towers rising to 20 storeys or above are planned in London over the next two decades.

Up to 150 of them will be residential towers, transforming the capital into a high-rise city, but the planning system is ill-prepared for them and the public largely unaware, English Heritage has warned.

This wave of planning applications has sparked calls for clearer planning guidance and greater effort to encourage public debate about the planned transformation of the London skyline.

Roger Barker from English Heritage warned this could result in a ‘wall of development stretching from Vauxhall through to Southwark’, with perhaps a dip at the South Bank.

Speaking at the launch event for a planned new exhibition highlighting the changes called ‘London’s Growing…Up!’ this April, he said that tall buildings were being used too much by their proposers as the ‘panacea’ or answer to several problems.

Architectural rendering studio Hayes Davidson has created images of how the Square Mile could look in 10-15 years time.

But the architect for London’s tallest residential building has defended the spread of high-rise south of the river from its traditional home of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf.

Peter Vaughan, director at architectural practice Broadway Malyan, said: “In the absence of planning frameworks we shouldn’t be surprised that developers believe their site is a good location for a tower.

“In the absence of a ‘no’, developers understandably assume ‘yes’ and until a city-wide framework sets out what is possible long public enquiries will continue to be required to judge experiments.”

He added: “The idea of ‘jumping the river’ is inevitable and entirely right given that historically some of the most impoverished London boroughs, with the space and opportunity necessary for tall buildings, are south of the river.”

Vaughan said that predictions of a ‘wall of high-rise buildings’ running down the southside of the Thames were overblown.

“Real estate has always been currency and today’s gold standard happens to be London residential.

“But there won’t be a ‘wall of development’ south of the river due to the constraints that do exist.

“However, there are clear opportunities for needle and point buildings, rather than clusters of tall buildings, at key river crossing and transport interchanges.

“The tall building clusters that exist in The City and at Canary Wharf are such for particular reasons – sitting inland of the river. It’s interesting to see that the Walkie Talkie has crossed the road southwards, revaluing the entire street.

“The South Bank, can and should, accommodate a ‘ribbon of high points’ in contrast to the constrained environment north of the river.”

 London’s Growing… Up! exhibition, starts 3 April at the Building Centre.

Sandringham House – the newest phase at One Tower Bridge – has 44 luxury apartments with stylish interiors, a private spa and virtual golf centre.

One Tower Bridge, being built right next to the iconic London landmark, is shaping up to become a sparkling addition to the so-called “string of pearls” along the South Bank cultural quarter.

The cluster of nine architecturally distinctive buildings faces the Tower of London on the opposite bank of the Thames and includes a 20-storey skyscraper with just one apartment on each floor, the top one a spectacular triplex penthouse with roof garden and glazed enclosure.

But the development of 356 flats is about the urban realm as much as river views. One Tower Bridge is not gated and will integrate seamlessly with the riverside promenade and a public park alongside City Hall.

A listed Victorian school on the site is being converted into a boutique hotel and a performance space will be created, while high-quality landscaping will include an interactive fountain clock with water jets and colour-changing lights allowing residents and visitors to choreograph their own water display.

Berkeley Homes, the developer, is offering luxury flats with smart technology that is new to London. Residents will have “keyless” entry to their apartment and be able to remotely control heating and lighting through an iPhone, while a touch-screen command will deliver their car from a stacker system underground.

Sandringham House, pictured, is the latest phase, 44 apartments in a sleek-design block clad in glass and stone. Classy interiors have herringbone-pattern wood flooring, built-in coffee machines and wine coolers and a home automation system controlling blinds, lighting, heating and audiovisual equipment. Residents will also have use of a private spa and be able to play virtual golf.

Prices from £950,000.

It is rare to find a part of the City fringe where a development boom is only just getting into its stride. Aldgate, on the eastern edge of the financial district, used to be a dead zone after working hours. However, close proximity to a prosperous banking community has helped to seed regeneration.

A new phase of apartments has been released at Goodman’s Fields, which in medieval times supplied food to London but is now becoming a new seven-acre “urban quarter” with a mix of homes, shops, restaurants and bars, hotel, public park and plaza.

The development aims to be part of the Square Mile yet have its own identity, and will eventually include more than 900 homes. Meranti House is a 20-storey tower with 107 flats and duplex penthouses boasting splendid views, and with a residents’ pool, gym and spa in the plan. Prices from £650,000.

Developers are in overdrive to meet rising demands, due to a new homes shortage coupled with the popular Help to Buy scheme, in the capital. We take a look at the latest new-builds and fabulous restorations.

The new-build sector pauses for breath in January as a rule, as developers wait for spring to draw home buyers out of hibernation. Buoyed by the Government’s Help to Buy low-deposit scheme, however, builders are throwing open show home doors and unveiling mock-up apartments in hastily constructed marketing suites, as the shortage of completed new homes continues to push home seekers into off-plan buying.

December saw the highest sales rate in six years, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. The momentum is expected to continue this year, bringing more price hikes, with Marylebone and the South Bank hitting the highest returns.

Today’s cost-conscious buyers want the best possible value for money in areas with growth. Developers in hot competition are coming up with low-maintenance homes with imaginative architecture, to suit most budgets.

New-build homes have become so popular that the price premium is at a new high, as much as 60 per cent more expensive than older homes of the same size in the same area, according to property adviser Knight Frank.

To find the right home at the right price, Londoners are relocating to other boroughs or crossing the river. Estate agent Winkworth, which has more than 60 branches across London, says the main flows are from north and west London to south London for   significantly cheaper family homes and new London Overground stations. This mobility is helping to revitalise areas such as Brockley. Run-down districts are opening up to homebuyers, too, with developers unlocking industrial sites, restoring railway arches and building apartments and townhouses plus offices and new parks.

Historic charm
Few London districts have the authentic, village-like charm of the Georgian conservation area that surrounds Myddelton Square in Islington. Once the heart of the now-defunct Borough of Finsbury, by the Nineties the area had lost much of its identity, eclipsed by regeneration going on around its edges at Angel, King’s Cross and Clerkenwell.

However, the pendulum has started to swing back. Look here for a central London area with character and family life: parish church, primary school, Sadler’s Wells theatre, a newly built health centre and small, independent shops for everyday needs. Two listed houses, once offices, have been restored and given a design makeover, including glass-walled rear extensions. Prices from £5.7 million. And coming soon on River Street is a rare new-build scheme of six townhouses in a gated mews.

Family-friendly Fulham
A new private garden square, London Square Fulham, offers 40 Georgian-style townhouses and extras usually found only with apartment living — gated security, underground parking and concierge. Cars are parked in an underground garage with direct access to the houses, while pedestrians arrive via a listed double-arched entrance. The houses range from 1,400sq ft to 4,000sq ft, with three to five bedrooms and have light basements opening on to patio gardens. At the heart of each house is an oak-and-glass staircase, with surrounding open-plan living space. Prices from £2.6 million.

For singles, couples and second-steppers
New loft developments in London are rare these days as most of the best buildings were converted in the Nineties and Noughties, but The Piano Works in Kentish Town offers good-value spaces in a handsome Victorian factory. Prices from £400,000.

Balham, meanwhile — popular with young metro types who fill the bars, gastropubs and delis along the lively high road — boasts Flow, a new apartment scheme close to the lively strip and the Tube station. The flats are priced from £390,995 to £725,995.

The historic core of Westminster is witnessing the biggest injection of new homes since the Edwardian mansion block boom a century ago. Traditionally favoured by MPs and senior civil servants, the attractive location and classical buildings are pulling in the buyers, with 73 Great Peter Street among smart new developments. The scheme offers 22 apartments, from studios to penthouses with views of Big Ben. Prices from £1.37 million.

First-timers zone in
Affordable shared-ownership flats in Zone 1 are a tantalising prospect for low-budget first-time buyers. Aspire is part of a 21-storey residential tower being built above Aldgate East Tube station on the City fringe. One-bedroom homes start at £105,700 for a 35 per cent share (full price £302,000). With a five per cent deposit of £5,285, combined rent and mortgage repayments would be £849.48 a month.

River views to Kew
The name Kew Bridge West might be slightly stretching the imagination but this cluster of new homes rising up on the Brentford bank of the Thames has views across the river to Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The development’s curved, turreted style is influenced, says developer St James, by the architectural style of rural France. Prices  from £345,000.

Kensington remains the location of choice for the rich and powerful despite its dreary high street. But suddenly a crop of new homes has widened the area’s draw. The Ladbroke Grove is a contemporary-design new-build scheme on the border with Notting Hill. Prices from £425,000.Nearby is 205 Holland Park Avenue, another new-build — 41 apartments with winter gardens and roof terraces.

At 375 Kensington High Street is the Royal Borough’s biggest housing scheme, a complex of modern blocks with 339 flats, spa, private cinema and concierge. Prices from £910,000.