Grosvenor Terrace · Camberwell SE5
Five-bedroom duplex penthouse on Grosvenor Terrace, SE5. Two terraces, one for the morning sun, one for the sunset. Twelve minutes to London Bridge. The skyline view came included.
Register your interestThe home
The top floor has the principal bedroom, three more doubles, a small study, and the family bathroom. The lower floor is the open kitchen-diner-living, plus the en-suite guest bedroom. Both terraces open off the lower floor, which is where most of the day-to-day happens. Cooking, eating, working, weather-watching.
Just under 2,000 sq ft total. Lift in the building. Off-street parking. Secure bike storage. Gas central heating. Share of freehold, with 975 years left on the lease.
The view
Six years of photographs taken from this address. The London Eye, the BT Tower, the Shard, plus the kind of weather most people pay to watch from hotels.
Inside
A double-height central stair connects the two floors. Bedrooms upstairs, kitchen and reception downstairs. Almost every room has full-height glazing or a window that opens onto a city view.
Outside
The south-facing one gets the morning sun. The other one gets the sunset and most of the summer cooking. Both are usable from April through October. A few weeks either side if you don't mind a jumper.
From the owners
We stretched to buy this place. Then we worked out how to make it pay for itself.
For six years we ran one of the spare bedrooms on Airbnb (five hundred-plus stays before we stopped counting) and let another to a long-term lodger. Between the two, the rooms covered the entire mortgage every month. Not most of it. All of it.
Today both rooms are with long-term lodgers at £1,200 and £1,400 a month. That's £2,600 a month of room income before you've even thought about Airbnb again. The Airbnb setup is still there if you want to switch the third room back on: bedding, lockable door, en-suite, the cleaning rhythm we used to use. We just stopped because two long-term lodgers turned out to be a lot less work than two hundred guest turnovers a year.
A note on the practical side. Under HMRC's Rent-a-Room scheme, the first £7,500 of lodger income each year is tax-free for a live-in landlord. Most high-street lenders are fine with the arrangement provided you tell them. Southwark's short-let licensing has shifted a couple of times since we started, so anyone planning to repeat the Airbnb part should check the current rules with their solicitor before banking on the income. We'd rather you have the real picture than the polished one.
For the record, we didn't buy this place to run an Airbnb. We bought it because we wanted to live in it. The rooms-paying-for-themselves part came afterwards, when we sat down with the spreadsheet and realised we'd stretched too far. If you're sitting at a similar spreadsheet right now, that part still works.
Location
Specifications
Register your interest
Enquiries go to Daniel Cobb, who handles the listing. They usually come back within the working day.