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It's official: the top tower in London (and it's not just about height)

Even if they have not been to market, a new company is valuing every building in the entire country

The Shard and the city
The Shard - London's top tower

The Shard is the most valuable skyscraper in the UK, valued at £1.5bn.

This is followed by the HSBC Tower in Canary Wharf, at £990m, and comes from a survey of more than 600,000 buildings across the country.

GeoPhy, a big data company which carried out the research, also found that the Qatar-based entities currently own 34pc of the top 15 most expensive skyscrapers in London – more than the proportion owned by all UK companies, at less than 21pc.

• Revealed: plans for the UK's next mega-skyscraper that will rival the Shard
The glare of the Walkie Talkie building
The Walkie Talkie tower

It also calculated that foreign ownership of the current top 15 most valuable towers was non-existent until 2005, when 32pc was owned by non-UK entities. This ratio steadily increased until the current amount.

Towers higher than st pauls - list of 30 - 15 that had the highest value.

  1. The Shard - £1.49bn
  2. HSBC Tower - £990m
  3. Citigroup Tower - £971m
  4. One Canada Square - £935m
  5. Walkie Talkie - £897m
  6. Leadenhall Building - £843m
  7. Citypoint - £777m
  8. 1 Churchill Place - £700m
  9. The Gherkin - £619m
  10. Heron Tower - £554m
  11. Broadgate Tower - £476m
  12. Willis Building - £475m
  13. 25 Churchill Place - £381m
  14. Tower 42 - £379m
  15. Euston Tower - £228m

GeoPhy, a Dutch company, is hoping to disrupt the UK’s opaque commercial real estate market, by using algorithms to value property even if it has never been on the market.

It uses an algorithm which takes into account data sets to do with location, reliability and proximity to public transport, the local environment, whether there are nearby shops, vacancy rates, and the condition of the building .

This score, plus rent, the size of the building, as well as a yield which the company calculates according to risk perception, are put together to come up with an estimate for the value, which the company claims is accurate within 5pc.

London skyline - stock market and retirement income
London's skyline

The company aims to provide clarity to those who were previously making decisions based on hunches rather than data. Its clients include pension funds and other institutions which own large property portfolios, or invest in developers. The company aims to create a similar database for residential property this year.

Teun van den Dries, the chief executive, said: “Everything we had heard about the international property markets put the UK ahead in transparency and openness, and then within the UK London by miles. It never materialised.” He added that there is no complete list of the details of every building in the country.

The current ratio of UK ownership to foreign ownership of the top 15 most expensive buildings in the world “is at its lowest ever, at least for these buildings if not for the country in general," said Mr van den Dries.

Brookfield, a Canadian asset manager, owns 12pc of the top 15 buildings; other big investors include Oman, the Saud family, a Kuwaiti property investor, and the Brazilian Safra Group.

Mr van den Dries said: “People are used to making a lot of money in this business and there’s very little incentive to try and change. And any transparency or openness that you try and bring, for everyone that likes it we always have one that hates it and try to shut us down.”