Love from London: $200 million penthouse, anyone?

Don’t worry, I am not going to turn this into a real estate blog. I realize I recently blogged about the real estate prices in London, but I just couldn’t NOT tell you that in London, somebody actually bought a new development condo for £100 million ($200 million), which is incidentally the most expensive apartment ever sold, anywhere. That is the kind of town London is these days.

The development, One Hyde Park, is located–you guessed it–right by Hyde Park in Knightsbridge opposite the Mandarin Oriental hotel and not far from the department store Harrods.

According to SkyscraperNews, the somebody was Sheikh Hamad, the foreign minister of Qatar and the owner of Al Jazeera, whose £100 million offer last year exceeded the £82 million the flat was originally said to be on sale for suggesting that a bidding war went on between potential purchasers eager to snap it up. The facilities apparently include everything a billionaire could ask for: a private lift, bullet proof glass windows, and an underground passage linking it into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to save him ever having to walk down the street with the great unwashed.

By the way, the great unwashed would be us, folks.