Harrods Estates, the 130-year-old luxury real estate brand in London, has closed down.
Its demise is thought to have been brought on by changes to the ultra-prime property market, which has been hit by a combination of tax rises, the end of the non-dom status and notably the Knightsbridge neighbourhood losing its appeal for wealthy clients who were choosing to buy property in nearby Mayfair, Belgravia or Notting Hill.
Harrods Estates was founded in 1897 to sell homes to the British aristocracy and international industrialists, with clients from the Middle East dominating its client list in recent decades.
At one point, it had four London offices and counted Diana, Princess of Wales’s stepmother Raine Spencer as a director.
"In those days everyone who was anyone wanted to list with the agency and Countess Spencer would attend property launches and add real celeb power,” said Rosy Khalastchy, Director at Beauchamp Estates.
Its final office on Brompton Road is now closed and its website says it is not accepting more enquiries. It is continuing to support clients with existing lettings or sales.
It has been under the ownership of the Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, since 2010 after it was acquired from businessman Mohamed Al Fayed. Since his death in 2023, more than 150 people have come forward to report allegations of sexual assault, rape, sexual exploitation and human trafficking, which are being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.
In a statement to The National, Harrods Estates said it made the decision to “wind-down its operations”, in line with the end of its lease. “The office closed as planned following the end of the lease at the end of March, and plans have been put in place to ensure there will be no impact on Harrods Estates current clients,” it said.
Residential director Shaun Drummond told PrimeResi the decision was part of a strategic shift by the wider Harrods Group to “focus on its core proposition of luxury retail, catering for clients and customers within the Knightsbridge store and online”.
Ms Khalastchy said that while the scandal over the allegations surrounding Mr Fayed had not helped the business, the big change was to Knightsbridge's reputation in the past decade. "It has dropped from being the most fashionable and sought after luxury address in London to being overtaken by Mayfair and Belgravia as the top addresses," she told The National. "Also, the younger generation of buyers from the Middle East, unlike their parents and grandparents, no longer just wanted to live a five minutes walk from Harrods and use Harrods Estates as their local London estate agent.
“Instead, the young Middle Eastern buyers were happy to buy in Mayfair, in Bayswater, Marylebone and St John’s Wood, so Harrods Estates lost customers as other rival addresses became sought after with a new younger generation of buyers.
“The estate agency market in the past 20 years has become multinational and firms like Beauchamp Estates, Savills and Sotheby's all expanded overseas and had offices around the world. Harrods Estates chose to remain domestic and focus only on Central London and in hindsight this didn’t help the brand to thrive and survive.”
While Knightsbridge maintains a reputation for wealth and luxury, centred around the Harrods department store, its period properties are limited in providing the modern amenities such as security, gyms, spas and concierges sought by international buyers. Actor Tom Cruise recently packed up and left his £35 million ($47.9 million) flat after a nearby Rolex shop was the target of a smash-and-grab armed robbery.
Since One Hyde Park was unveiled in 2011, new-build luxury developments have stalled in the area while Mayfair surged ahead as part of a transformation of the neighbourhood from commercial to residential.
Knightsbridge properties fetched around £1 million for 485 square feet in 2025, according to a report by property search and acquisition consultancy Black Brick.
The entire luxury property market has been affected by the scrapping of the non-dom status last April, which fuelled a flurry of departures from the UK, notably to the UAE. Non-doms were UK residents whose permanent home for tax purposes is outside the UK, meaning they paid tax only on the money they earned in the UK. Any money made abroad was only taxed by the UK if it was brought into the UK.
Taxation has also increased. Income tax stands at 45 per cent, capital gains tax (CGT) at 24 per cent, and inheritance tax of 40 per cent.
Jeremy Gee, managing director of Beauchamp Estates, said in December: “In 2025, the London super-prime property market has been driven by an outflow of non-dom vendors leaving for Dubai and Abu Dhabi, replaced by an incoming wave of ‘bargain hunting’ Middle Eastern, Turkish, Chinese, American and domestic UK buyers.”
