London new-home sales rise after first price cuts since 2010

Bloomberg

Sales of London homes under construction rose as developers lowered asking prices for the first time since 2010.
About 6,900 of the properties were sold in the first quarter, the most in three years, with about 30 percent snapped up by institutional investors betting on rental properties, according to a report by Molior London seen by Bloomberg News.
Londoners are increasingly choosing to rent after years of surging values made it harder to buy a home. Invesco Ltd., LendLease Group, Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are among investors buying or building rental properties in the city to capitalise on the demand.
“Without the build-to-rent sector, it is likely that weeds would still be growing on a number of the sites concerned,” analysts at Molior said in the report.
“Perhaps in the easier times, when most of these projects were conceived, a better margin was envisaged. But at this point in time, the priority is presumably to make a sustainable living and keep projects moving through the pipeline.”
Property prices in the city had their first drop since 2009 in February, according to the Office for National Statistics. Values fell 1 percent from a year earlier, compared with annual growth of as much as 20.6 percent in August 2016.