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12th January 2021
The startling tale of how a lorry-driving conman extracted £1m from a property mogul as a down payment on a top London hotel.
To grasp how a bankrupt 49-year-old Yorkshire lorry driver induced a respectable Dutch property mogul to part with £1m in return for a pledge to sell him the Ritz for £250m requires a refresher on the feverish state of the UK real estate sector in December 2006, the month Marcel Boekhoorn wired the money to Anthony Lee.
Irish investors had been sluicing money into UK... Read More >
Recent Articles:
4th January 2021
The European real estate universe grows ever move diverse by the year, with the constant geographical expansion of previous times now replaced by a push into new sectors and, more fundamentally, new ways of investing, with an exposure to the Read More >
17th December 2020
In this very special series of exclusive articles for the Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker reflects on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Norman Read More >
9th December 2020
The benefits from adding real estate investments to a multi-asset portfolio have been well researched. Real estate has low correlation relative to other asset classes, high Sharpe ratios, greater proportion of total return attributable to Read More >
1st December 2020
The spring lockdown did not stop UK M&A in its tracks, but activity slowed. Faced with the fog of economic uncertainty, some buyers put their chequebooks back in the drawer, and vendors pressed pause. Since the first lockdown ended – and Read More >
24th November 2020
Two of our top contributors, Bill Blain and Ethan Yang, argue it out over bitcoin. Is it no more than imaginary money we'd be foolish to trust, or could it be a medium of growing substance that at the very least is telling us something Read More >
16th November 2020
Forget the doomsayers: we are on the verge of a golden age.
Former US vice-president Dan Quayle once said: “The future will be better tomorrow.” Right now, I’m willing to risk the ridicule of using this statement. Although it might not Read More >
9th November 2020
On the ghoulishly appropriate date of 31 October – Halloween – Boris Johnson announced new lockdown measures. “These measures above all will be time-limited,” the prime minister assured the people. “They will end on Wednesday 2 Read More >
2nd November 2020
Many of us are guilty of equating status, success and ultimately happiness, with material possessions. Even if, like me, you make a conscious effort to avoid such associations, most of us tend to go through life accumulating a lot more stuff Read More >
27th October 2020
Early in the pandemic I advised readers to zone out, take a break, and read fiction and other works of art that have stood the test of time. There’s only so much crazy we can deal with and there’s only so much mental benefits to be had from Read More >
19th October 2020
The morning after Trump was elected, people in my university class were crying.
Fair enough, you think: you’ve heard about the emotional fragility of today’s youth, and perhaps you’ve read Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s Read More >
12th October 2020
On 12 October 1864, Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, passed away. Abraham Lincoln (finally!) had the opportunity to replace that man. There was never a doubt that Lincoln would nominate a successor. On the other Read More >
30th September 2020
In this very special series of exclusive articles for the Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker will reflect on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Read More >
21st September 2020
The late Anwar Sadat, when president of Egypt, called 1973 his autumn of destiny. I call 2020 my autumn of destiny because four of the world’s top software/fintech will go public in IPOs in Hong Kong or New York. Each of these IPOs will be Read More >
14th September 2020
Do Americans “vote with their wallets?” This near-ubiquitous cliche seems at first to pass the test of common sense. Why wouldn’t people vote for the candidates under whom they’ll do the best financially? A wealthy voter should favor the Read More >
8th September 2020
Money is an indispensable part of modern economic activity. It was not always so: barter, where goods trade directly for other goods, was the norm for most of human history. But the rise of money as an economic institution greatly increased Read More >
1st September 2020
City centres and suburbs have been subject to both centripetal and centrifugal forces in modern times. During the first four decades after World War II, rapidly growing middle-class incomes in the Western world translated into expanding city Read More >
25th August 2020
Inflation came in much stronger than economists anticipated across the major western economies in July, highlighting that the effects of the pandemic are not purely deflationary. In the UK, CPI inflation jumped up from +0.6% in June to +1.0% in Read More >
10th August 2020
Price discovery in the private real estate market is always a challenge when there is a sudden change in the market as we have now with COVID-19. As happened during past recessions, the number of transactions grinds almost to a halt Read More >
3rd August 2020
There is something slightly soul-crushing about the news that the Government is mulling a new digital sales tax to ‘save the high street’.
It isn’t just the prospect of ministers raising the cost of living for online shoppers at a Read More >
27th July 2020
From the beginning of this virus, political elites have used the language of war. The invisible enemy would be contained, suppressed, and beaten into submission. Then….it would go away.
The tactics would be travel bans, shutdowns, Read More >
20th July 2020
THE IMPACT of the coronavirus crisis on London is becoming clear to see. Yesterday the Evening Standard laid bare the scale of the economic devastation to the British capital. Let’s take the headline numbers: “50,000 West End Read More >
13th July 2020
Many millions of people have spent the last four months in sadness and depression. It’s hard to watch the world shattered by the bad behavior of governments – and to see too many among us cheer the destruction – and not feel a sense of Read More >
6th July 2020
One of the most marvelous books I’ve read this year is Donald Henderson’s personal story of the eradication of smallpox. The book is Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer. It’s a brilliant and Read More >
30th June 2020
In over 30 years of involvement in US real estate, I have never encountered a dilemma in institutional office investment similar to what we are experiencing today. About half of my peers at Barings, and around the industry, are expecting a Read More >
22nd June 2020
Assuming the U.S. elections still happen in November 2020– how might that affect the U.S. economy and investment returns going forward?
While no one can yet predict the outcome of the November election – it may be instructive Read More >
15th June 2020
According to the IPCC we have about 10 years – at current emission rates – before the planet hits the CO2 budget limit consistent with giving us a fair chance of avoiding an average temperature increase of 1.5 degrees. Beyond that increase Read More >
10th June 2020
Netflix has added twice as many new subscribers as it expected during lockdown. I am one of them, signing up to watch “The Last Dance”, a documentary based on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls.
I loved the series, Read More >
1st June 2020
It’s hard to overstate the power of incentives. Charlie Munger says: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”.
The biggest factor determining how well incentivised you are is whether you own something. If you own your own Read More >
26th May 2020
When your ideology states that climate change is the most important thing facing the world and some pesky pandemic has the poor judgement to interrupt The Cause, you need to act fast. There must be something that connects the pandemic back to my Read More >
20th May 2020
The spread of coronavirus has required us all to change our behaviour. One of the most significant shifts as far as property is concerned is the abrupt switch to home working by most office employees. The majority have found this a smooth, Read More >
13th May 2020
Balance sheets show the trade-off between resilience and optimisation
% of companies with net cash
Source: CLSA, Factset as at 21 April 2020
As we highlighted last month, coronavirus is especially dangerous for patients with Read More >
5th May 2020
We are starting to appreciate some of the damage that the Covid-19 crisis is doing to the economy but in the western world the first warning lights came when stock markets lurched downwards in late February. In the past 6 weeks There has been Read More >
27th April 2020
For most of human history matters of life and death lay almost entirely outside the material world. Saving a life at any cost feels to most of us like a moral imperative, but the astonishing leaps forward in science and technology that define Read More >
20th April 2020
In engineering, noise is a disturbance around a signal and engineers have become good at extracting signals from the noise. In investing, noise comes in many forms and actions are determined by noise, signals or a combination of Read More >
17th April 2020
In this article I look at the S&P 500’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, the impact on CAPE valuations and what that means for the index’s expected ten-year returns.
The world is in the grip of a rapidly expanding pandemic Read More >
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