Last week, I went to an airport. This was my first time since February 2020 – a period of over 500 days. I felt both excitement and trepidation at revisiting this once too-familiar routine. Just a few years ago, I might have passed through an airport a hundred times in any 500 days, an energy-draining […]
Originally published January 2021. In 1929, when an American congressman compared England’s longest river unfavourably with the Mississippi, the MP for Battersea, John Burns, quipped: “The Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history.” Burns was not one for hyperbole. The Thames, which flows from the Cotswolds in the west to the North […]
The Church of England has confirmed plans to apologise to UK Jews for medieval antisemitic laws, put in place centuries before the church itself existed. The anticipated apology is a curious one, especially as the modern British Jewish community has not been actively calling for it. The measures in question, put in place by the […]
We always get slightly nervous at REFIRE when Germany goes all bullish on the stock market. It’s not that we don’t believe in the stock market as a source of capital and wealth building – we do – but it’s just that, well… Germans in general don’t buy into that story. They save, they rent […]
Originally published January 2021. The way we educate our school-leavers needs to change. I can recall being staggered, when first working in the US, by how much personal debt individuals took on as a matter of course to attain a degree. I also remember thinking how fortunate we were in the UK that education to […]
Shopping centres and offices are the surprise front-runners in the REIT scene. In the spring edition of The Property Chronicle, I ventured to suggest that, while there is something for everyone in the REIT sector this year, retail property could complete the sector playing with a full deck of cards. To recount, attractive dividend yields and […]
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 has a limited life expectancy of five years from December 2018 due to a diagnosed terminal blood […]
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To read or re-read the first four chapters of French Reconnection, please follow the link at the bottom […]
Among the many quotes attributed to Einstein, the following seems most pertinent as we look to the future: ‘’The significant challenges we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that we were at when we created them’. Undoubtedly as we move forward, both dealing and learning to live with the impact of […]
There were two recent events of importance to the private rental sector. These were, first, the announcement on how the Government will take forward the various limitations on termination of tenancies and evictions which were introduced as a result of Covid-19 and were to expire at the end of May. Second was the Queen’s Speech, […]
