North London based auctioneers, McHugh & Co held their second auction of the year on 2nd May at the BAFTA, Piccadilly, London W1. To-date of the 43 lots on offer - 80% have been sold raising £10,888,000.

Auctioneer Chris McHugh was understandably pleased with the outcome: "Once again we had a full room and keen bidding with startling prices being achieved on some lots. We have a good reputation with regular buyers as they know we are not prepared to fill the catalogue with stock at unrealistic reserve prices. Given the paltry returns on bank deposits these days there is plenty of money out there looking for solid returns from quality property."

Lot 9 - a plot of land adjacent to 1 Clarkson Row, Regents Park, London, NW1 underlined the current demand for well-located land in and around central London. Described in the auction catalogue as a freehold car park site with residential development potential and guided at £400,000 it sold in the room for £940,000 after some very keen bidding between a numbers of potential buyers.

This represents a quite staggering price for a relatively small piece of land which does not as yet have planning permission. In a year or so it will be interesting to see what has been done to it by the winning bidder given that the proximity of the adjacent property has side windows overlooking the plot which will mean that light intrusions issues will reduce the scale of any build out on this plot.