by When London closed in April 2020, Marcus O’Brien was finalizing the sale of 2-8a Rutland Gate: a palatial property consisting of four townhouses joined together, overlooking Hyde Park. It went for £210 million: the most expensive house ever sold in Britain. The buyer was Hong Kong billionaire Cheung Chung-kiu. He never moved in, and O’Brien moved on: jumping from his role as head of the Private Office at Beauchamp Estates, to UK Sotheby’s International Realty.
Part of a new cohort of movers and shakers including George Vernon, Oliver Bernard’s protégé; Alice Freeman, partner in the super-rental team at Knight Frank; and Daniel Daggers, star of the new Netflix show buy london, O’Brien has been appointed head of the UK luxury agency’s Family Office: a new focal point for the super-rich looking for advice on how to spend it. This is the first of London’s outposts for a new, younger generation of gazillionaires who thrive in a world of monogrammed towels, home spas, Saatchi-approved art and luxury homes. ‘Seventy per cent of my sales are off-market,’ says O’Brien. Of the financial status of his clients, he considers ’35 per cent’ to be non-local.
O’Brien is the son of Jon O’Brien, the founder of boutique property developer DOMVS, so he knows a thing or two about the dynastic complexities that play out between the generations in the families he calls clients. To add to this, he is former Beauchamp boss Gary Hersham, whose agency was behind some of London’s most notable transactions: Caroline Terrace (£60m) and Grosvenor Crescent (£100m).
But Sotheby’s, with O’Brien at their helm, is running out of time. He is, against Hersham, 71 years old, cherubic: 32 years old and enjoying an influx of young buyers clamoring for someone more aligned with their tastes. ‘In the last 10 years, the average age of a buyer with $25 million or more to spend has dropped by 12 years, globally,’ he says. Competition is heating up for the first gen of luxury agents – Andrew Langton, Peter Wetherell – and the classic stomping grounds of Mayfair and Belgravia. Today’s carriers are entrepreneurs from the United States and China, along with Russian and Middle Eastern industriousness: profiles in search of greener pastures, namely Notting Hill, where already stratospheric prices have been forced higher by during the pandemic as London’s most desirable homes became available. with “direct access” to “the best garden squares”. There was a price flip, with houses on main roads in W11 £4,500 per sq ft compared to £3,000 per sq ft in Eaton Square.
Amid these individual changes in the market, London remains the world capital of luxury real estate. Traditionally in the United Kingdom O’Brien says the job of an estate agent: but thanks to famous shows such as Sunset sale, we now take after the US, where the profession carries more treasure. A US realist needs renewal every four years, to keep them at the top of their game; and the success stories speak for themselves (the Oppenheim brothers, Kurt Rappaport). London’s top agents aren’t just rubbing shoulders with the super-rich, they’re doing so themselves.
You have to put yourself into their lives to understand what makes them tick
Marcus O’Brien
It’s a gilded world. O’Brien isn’t worried about the change in non-residential status coming in 2025: his market is as defensive as wine bullets in his clients’ cellars. ‘There will always be a queue of people waiting to buy a house in Kensington Palace Gardens,’ he says. His entire universe revolves around his clients: ‘They will come to my wedding, to parties… We will take the private plane to Miami with them.’ His team advises on all sorts of subjects from which to buy art for the right schools. ‘You have to put yourself into their lives to understand what makes them tick,’ he says: and what they are most likely to spend their money on.
O’Brien invited me to lunch at 5 Hertford Street, a private club that a friend called at the time the Toads of Toad Hall gallery. A bit harsh, I thought, after examining it: the interior is much more Houghton Hall and the clientele more foreign aristocracy than British upper crust. It’s the kind of place a club blazer will get you if, like me, you’ve failed to check the dress code. O’Brien, who comes after him, must have clocked him but he makes no statement. Diplomacy and discretion are the heart of his craft.
And yet, the lifestyle is loud. O’Brien’s life is one of Michelin-starred lunches, vintage car races, and private jets—part of an effort to attract new clients and consolidate the loyalty of others. He travels wherever they go: last week, he spent Monday and Tuesday in the Bahamas; Wednesday and Thursday in London; Friday and Saturday in Antigua. The day after we meet, he is off to Milan; then Monaco for the RM Sotheby car auction and the opening of two houses in Antibes. He recounts a recent trip with a US client that gets more baroque with every clause: he was told while dining with clients one night that he was expected at Battersea helipad at 8am the next day, to be accompanied to the Cotswolds to see a house. , only stopping by a vintage car garage in the Home Counties to check out (and buy) a few Ferraris (250 GTOs, to be precise). It’s not a carbon-neutral job – despite sustainability being, according to O’Brien, a growing concern among young buyers. I am told that the DOMVS development on Avenue Road is using thermal boreholes as an energy source.
The super-rich are also super-fickle. ‘They can wake up one day with a complete infatuation to start a new collection of scraped cigars,’ says O’Brien. ‘And they’ll say: ‘Marcus, where can I buy Behike 56s?’ [one of the world’s rarest, of which only a thousand were made]’. They are also too demanding and do not overlook mistakes. It is that mindset that has made them so successful, he says. I ask him if he ever wears the grind (‘I never fly’), or if he is treated as a weak or glorified PA. ‘It’s not’.
O’Brien is out with clients five nights a week and credits his wife for entertaining. She works for Katharine Pooley, Britain’s Interior Designer of the Decade: clients have repeatedly hired O’Brien to remodel their homes (‘there’s a lot of synergy between us’). They live together on Chesham Street, an ambassador road in SW1 just 15 minutes from Sotheby’s, where one of O’Brien’s clients recently bought Renoir’s shop. Flowers in a vase (estimate: £2m to £3m). That, as well as the original vase itself.
What the rich do with their money – whether they’re splurging on art, cars or real estate, whatever their connections or opinions in such departments – is not a matter of which Marcus lives intellectually. He doesn’t address my concerns about gentrification when he mentions empty houses in the capital. Some are usually owned by non-resident buyers, he says, and under current rules this means they pay a whopping 17 per cent in tax duty. For him, that equates to the staff they employ and a social contribution. But such buyers are often masters of tax avoidance, taking on the rules to ensure that they return. Are there points where this whole circus is overwhelming Ó Briain?
Obviously not. ‘You won’t guess how many houses one of my clients has,’ he says (I produced: he’s 23), adding proudly: ‘I’ve negotiated with many of the top 10s’. Including, indirectly, the second richest person in Asia, the Chinese property billionaire Hui Ka Yan for whom the buyer of Rutland Gate 2-8a, Cheung Chung-kiu, was effectively creating. O’Brien argues that ‘if you keep your morals right, and if you do what you believe is right – morally – it will pay dividends.’ He really is an excellent seller. As long as the house sells for the right price and the client is happy, that’s all that matters. Meanwhile, I forget to ask him about the ethics of the baby monks I saw on the menu.
