While London accounted for just under a third of all demand, Oxfordshire was in second place with 16.5% of Savills applicants looking to purchase in the £1million+ price bracket.
Lucian Cook, Director Savills research comments, "It is perhaps surprising that Oxfordshire is now more popular than the more traditional stockbroker counties but is does suggest that buyers are prepared to put up with a longer commuter in order to live in a more rural location where there are plenty of good schools and a number of vibrant towns."
The research also analysed what size property the £1million would buy in terms of floor area and number of bedrooms. In the traditional commuting counties including Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire the number of bedrooms was similar to the outer reaches of London such as Weybridge and Esher but did buy another 200sqft of floor space.
Such is the growing popularity of the South-West that both the number of bedrooms and total floor space is less than the eastern counties; 5.11 bedrooms versus 5.34 bedrooms and 3105sqft compared with 3594sqft.
Cook again, "Buyers believe that they're more likely to find a house and location that lives up to their imagined idyll in Dorset and Somerset than in Cambridgeshire and Essex, which are perceived to be overpopulated and not truly rural".
In the North the most popular county is Cheshire but it is Scotland where it is possible to buy most for £1million: on average, 6.47 bedrooms and 5,520 sqft.
List of top 20 counties on page below
The top 20 counties*
Counties % of all applicants over £1m
1 London 31.4%
2 Oxfordshire 16.5%
3 Surrey 15.0%
4 Buckinghamshire 13.3%
5 Berkshire 13.0%
6 Hertfordshire 11.7%
7 Hampshire 11.4%
8 Dorset 11.4%
9 Wiltshire 10.8%
10 Somerset 10.3%
11 Gloucestershire 9.5%
12 Kent 9.1%
13 West Sussex 7.7%
14 South Gloucestershire 7.3%
15 Bristol, City of 7.2%
16 West Midlands 7.1%
17 Cambridgeshire 6.9%
18 East Sussex 6.8%
19 Devon 6.6%
20 Essex 5.8%
*The figures are the proportion of all buyers who are looking in each location, bearing in mind that many will spread their search across several counties Savills Research.
