Gaming billionaire buys another London mansion for £24 million
IGOR Bukhman, co-founder of gaming giant Playrix, has bought a London mansion situated next door to one of his luxury houses.
The billionaire spent about £24 million (S$40.8 million) on the home in Kensington last summer, which sits next to a mansion he purchased for over £45 million in 2019, according to people familiar with the matter and government filings. The property is the second instalment in Bukhman’s plan to renovate the two houses.
Bukhman, who grew up in a city almost 300 miles north of Moscow, has a net worth of about US$3.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Playrix – which Bukhman co-founded with his brother Dmitry in the early 2000s – is one of the world’s largest mobile game developers, which saw its user count boom during the pandemic.
A representative for Bukhman declined to comment.
London’s luxury real estate market has remained relatively strong even as global central banks have increased interest rates. In 2023, some wealthy overseas buyers spent more than £100 million on their properties in the British capital, with Kensington making up 11 per cent of all £5 million-plus deals across the city, according to broker Savills.
Solina Chau, co-founder of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s venture arm, bought a luxury flat next to Green Park for £20.5 million in August last year – one of the capital’s biggest apartment deals of 2023. Citadel trader Adam Frame and Xu Xiaoping, one of China’s most successful angel investors, also bought London properties last summer for roughly £40 million each.
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While such transactions point to a seemingly robust market at the top end, the luxury segment paints a somewhat mixed picture. In London’s most affluent postcodes, sales fell about a third in November from the same period a year earlier, according to researcher LonRes.
Still, today’s billionaires – many of whom work in finance and tech – typically invest about a third of their total wealth on residential real estate, according to a report by Beauchamp Estates. What’s more, the number of super rich-individuals is projected to grow 28 per cent by 2026, the broker said.
The Bukhman brothers have rapidly built up their investments outside Playrix, which employs thousands of people worldwide. The brothers’ personal investment firm, Rix Capital, recently moved into its first permanent office in central London.
Playrix moved its headquarters to Ireland about a decade ago and closed its operations in the brothers’ homeland and Belarus in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Playrix was the world’s third-largest mobile game publisher by revenue in 2022, according to marketing agency Udonis. BLOOMBERG
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