An analysis of the 20 most expensive home sales in Britain shows only one British buyer: Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One billionaire, who spent a total of £101 million on property for his daughters Petra, 22, and Tamara, 27.
In a further sign of the shift towards international wealth, Britons featured far more prominently when it came to those giving up their properties.
Eight of the top 20 properties - which have a combined cost of more than £1.2 billion - were offloaded by Britons or UK-based developers.
In the past five years Lord Harris of Peckham, the Carpetright chairman, Sir Anthony Bamford, the JCB digger tycoon, and Annabel Nicoll, the daughter of Martyn Arbib, the former head of Perpetual fund management, all sold properties that subsequently made it into the top 20.
Ecclestone also sold, offloading 18-19 Kensington Palace Gardens to the Indian-born steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.
UK property developers do at least seem to be enjoying a healthy profit from the influx of foreign wealth. The British-based developers Oakmayne and Fitzroy have both clinched eight-figure sales, while Michael Spink, has sold two properties in the top 20.
A ten-bedroom villa in Upper Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, became the most expensive home in Britain in 2008 when he sold it for £80 million to the Ukrainian Elena Franchuk.
And last week Spink, a Yorkshire-born but London-based developer, surpassed himself when he sold Park Place, the Grade II-listed mansion near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, to a Russian billionaire for £140 million. The price tag made Park Place the most expensive home in Britain, and confirmed international wealth's pre-eminence in Britain's 'uber-prime' property market.
It broke the record set only four months earlier, when a penthouse in Knightsbridge's newly-opened One Hyde Park development sold for £136.4 million. The buyer that time was also eastern European, Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man. The sellers were again British, the property developer brothers Nick and Christian Candy.
The foreign acquisitions show no sign of stopping, regardless of fears of worldwide recession. One high-end agent admitted business was so brisk he had been forced to cancel his customary August holiday.
All bar two of the properties have been brought within the last five years and many have changed hands since the start of the economic downturn in autumn 2008. A quarter of the sales - worth a combined total of £413 million - have been in the first eight months of this year. Some reveal astonishing price rises: 105 Eaton Square, a six-floor mansion in London's Belgravia cost only £9.5 million in December 2005. It sold for £33 million in November 2009 – at the height of the post-credit crunch slump.
Ecclestone may now regret that he could not persuade his then wife Slavica to move in to 18-19 Kensington Palace Gardens. Her alleged dislike of the house forced the 2004 sale to Lakshmi Mittal for £57 million. One expert estimated the property's value today at about £125 million.
The analysis shows that the more expensive the properties have become, the less the British are involved. One agent said for £10 million-plus homes, foreign buyers account for about 50 per cent of sales. When it gets above £30 million, 90 per cent of buyers are international.
The potential international client base has also expanded greatly. The capital offered the house-hunting oligarch everything he desired: business opportunities; favourable tax regimes; fashion, culture and restaurants to satisfy even the most demanding wife or mistress.
Because the sales were largely focused on just a few select London roads like Kensington Palace Gardens and Bishops Avenue, Hampstead, it was also easy to find neighbours who were part of the billionaires international club.