But the problem is precisely that the flats aren't even rented out; they're just left sitting empty. Real-estate has apparently become the new gold bullion.
> But the problem is precisely that the flats aren't even rented out; they're just left sitting empty
Are they? According to the London Empty Homes Audit, january 2012 done on behalf of the GLA, there were 11202 units sitting empty in London at the time. londoncouncils.gov.uk on the other hand reports almost 80,000, or about 2.4% of units based on numbers from emptyhomes.com. Either way that seems way too small for property investors leaving flats empty being a big problem, especially given that a lot of these empty units are very obviously empty for other reasons, such as being in very undesirable state or bad locations. E.g. I very much doubt the 6k total that the source of the 80k number lists for Newham and Tower Hamlets is due to foreign investors (unless someone got scammed good).
Looking at the numbers for the rest of England from the same source indicates that London is middle of the tree in terms of percent of properties left empty compared to other regions, which you wouldn't expect to see if foreign investors was a particular problem in London. So either they're just as much of a problem elsewhere, or they're not having much impact in London.
The 80k source also breaks out the number of properties empty more than 6 months, and that is down to about 34k. Furthermore about 1/4 of empty properties are owned by the councils, housing associations or other semi-public bodies. So the percent of the total available properties left empty by investors necessarily can't be very high. Lets assume the councils etc. never leave their properties empty more than 6 months (yeah, right), and the whole 34k number is investors, as opposed to owners temporarily living out of country etc. - that is still just barely 1% of the market.
