JOHN´S MANSION FOR £14MILLION

The Surrey mansion where John Lennon wrote Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still for sale - 18 months after going on the market. It's a beautiful mansion in the heart of footballer country - where multi-million pound properties are everywhere.
John lived in 'Kenwood' with Cynthia for four years between 1964 and 1968, and is thought to have written several songs for the Beatles' eighth album there. He also filmed home movies at the house, some of which featured in the film Imagine: John Lennon.

The mansion is on the market for £13,750,000 with Estate Agent Knight Frank. It's impressive even without the Lennon connection. It's a six bedroom home in Weybridge in Surrey. It sits in 1.5 acres of sought-after land in the exclusive St George's Hill Estate. It has been completely refurbished, and has a cinema, snooker room, and a sauna, as well as six bedrooms, six bathrooms and six reception rooms.
At the bottom of the garden there's an indoor swimming pool complex, and it also comes with a separate coach house with offices and staff quarters.

 

Even without a celebrity link, it's an incredible house, and Lennon's name will add to its appeal. There's something very special about the Beatles which means people will be prepared to pay more than you might think for a piece of their history. John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce Phantom V (pictured), for example, sold for just under £1.5 million in 1985. Even the painted drum skin which was on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sold for just under £700,000 in 2008.
However, the property has been on the market since August 2012 when the owner was asking £15 million. The price was reduced in February 2013, but it still hasn't been snapped up. The experts at Prime Residential say that without the celebrity connection it would be worth up to £7 million, and they argue that even with the connection they'd be surprised if the seller got more than £9 million.
Celebrities don't necessarily add value to a property. A famous link will tend to have the effect of drawing attention to the property, which could help boost demand, which may push the price up, but there are no guarantees. Robbie Williams, for example, paid £8 million for a property in Wiltshire in 2009 and a year later sold it on for £2.5 million less.
And when you look at historic asking prices for the house, the current price starts to look like a bit of a stretch. It was on the market seven years ago for just £5.95 million, then again a year later for £5.8 million. Since then the tide has turned for properties of this size in this part of Surrey, but you have to wonder whether prices have really soared this much, or whether there's a chance that Lennon's house may just be a tiny bit on the expensive side.