£750,000 (1,462,500 USD)

This is the most expensive tree in Britain – worth more than three times the average price of a home. The Victorian plane, which has a 1.8m (6ft) wide trunk and stands in Berkeley Square in the heart of Mayfair, is valued at £750,000 (1,462,500 USD).
It may seem like a lot of money but there are dozens of other trees worth more than £500,000 in London’s richest boroughs, such as Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster.
When all the street trees in the capital are added together they are worth about £6.4billion, according to the Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees system.
The new guide assesses a tree’s worth by its size, health, historical significance and how many people live nearby to enjoy it.
Tree experts say it will end the ‘chainsaw massacre’ of trees blamed for subsidence in homes. In the past five years, London councils have chopped down nearly 40,000 street trees, some more than 100 years old.
But with the new system, the higher the value of a tree, the more proof insurers would need to show it has caused damage and have it felled.
Cavat, developed by the London Tree Officers Association, will be used across the capital later this year and go nationwide next year.
Andy Tipping, who chairs the association, said: ‘People are still not understanding that subsidence is a problem with buildings, not trees.
In many cases it’s other reasons such as drains, poorly installed double-glazing or climate change.
This is going to revolutionise the way in which subsidence claims are managed for the better of all – including householders, insuerers and local authorities.

200 million $

At 456 feet this vessel is better described as a cruise liner than a superyacht. Owned by Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian Defence Minister, and son of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Al Salamah has over 80 rooms and requires a crew of around 100 and comes complete with indoor swimming pool, cinema.

That little lot is powered by two 8770 hp MTU diesel engines which give it a top speed of 21.5 knots and was designed and built by the German shipyards HDW and Luerssen. It rather makes you wonder what Prince Aziz’s house is like.

$500M World Record

La Leopolda

Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea football club, Roman Abramovich, has purchased the world’s most expensive house, worth $500 million, British newspapers reported on Thursday.

Abramovich, 41, bought the La Leopolda villa on the French Riviera in honor of his upcoming marriage to model Daria Zhukova, 25.
The tycoon, who lives in Britain, already owns several impressive properties, including the nearby Chateaux de la Croe estate, as well as others in the exclusive London neighborhood of Knightsbridge, Sussex and in Russia. Former owners of the La Leopolda include Microsoft guru Bill Gates and Fiat mogul Gianni Agnelli.

Abramovich and Zhukova decided to buy the villa after being granted a private viewing. The property is located in the village of Villefranche, near Monte Carlo, sprawling over 40 dunams.

The estate was built by King Leopold of Belgium as a present for his mistresss. In 1952, Agnielli purchased it for $100,000 and in the 1980s offered to sell it to Lily Safra, wife of renowned banker Edmund Safra, for $3 million.

She refused the offer on the grounds that she did not want to support the 50 gardeners required for maintaining the grounds. Edmund Safra finally agreed to buy the villa in 1999, just a few months before he died in a fire in Monte Carlo home.

In 2006, Safra’s widow Lily sold the estate to Bill Gates, at the time the world’s wealthiest man.

Photo Courtesy Sotheby’s

The first photograph to sell for more than $3 million, Andreas Gurky’s 99 cent II, Diptych reached $3,340,456 at a Sotheby’s auction in London, February 2007. This was the third time the photograph had sold for more than $2 million. Another print of the same image was sold for $2.25 million in May, 2006, and yet another print had reached $2.48 million just six months later.

Interestingly, the record-breaking photograph was sold not at a photography auction, but at a sale of contemporary art. That might suggest that how an artwork is sold plays an important role in defining how much it can sell for.