This article was originally published in September 2018. The market players are different and the transactions are significantly more complex than 30 years ago Perhaps the long hot summer in continental Europe is not the most prudent time to review how fast transactions take to conclude. However, with the benefit of over 30 years of […]
This article was originally published in March 2019. Over almost 30 years UK house price gains have outperformed the best of British businesses. What next? Index performance rebased to 100 in January 1990 % What’s your biggest financial asset? For most Britons, it’s their home. 2.5 million Britons have doubled down on property and become […]
London’s West End, the ultimate UK town centre and home to hundreds of impressive landmarks and just 65,000 residents, was hit by the pandemic harder than other parts of the capital. But the famous central London area is not just responding to the urgent demands of coronavirus-driven economic rewiring. Since before the pandemic, a set […]
Who can resist being provided with a soapbox? The Property Chronicle asked whether, as a partner in a reasonably sized London law firm, I would reveal some of the black arts of solicitors, the most famously egregious being hourly billing and my favourite being using Latin phrases. But first, a rather more pressing and important […]
It has been one of the few good weeks for ‘man’ (occupied offices and physical retail) versus ‘machine’ (logistics), with Landsec and British Land both up 20% but declines for Zoom (-15%), Amazon (-6%) and even the seemingly unstoppable Segro (-2.3%). The investment market is unrecognisable as the market I joined two decades ago. In […]
In a development that will be viewed with alarm by all property investors, Germany’s politicians and government authorities are looking at whether the purchase of residential apartments should be restricted by law. A recent meeting in July by representatives of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Building (BMI) and other federal and state ministries […]
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 seem like it today, as the fog of this dreadful year starts to lift, […]
This article was originallly published in July 2019. Justin Bickle, formerly a managing director in Oaktree’s European Principal Group, tells Property Chronicle how turning around English National Ballet gave him the confidence to set up one of Ireland’s biggest housebuilders. Justin Bickle is a risk taker who seizes opportunities. You might think this unremarkable for […]
In the second of 12 episodes telling the story of his life in property, Oliver Ash recalls how Parisian geography got him all hot and bothered on the way to a job interview. This article was originally published in October 2019. Sometime around the middle of 1983, I picked up a copy of Chartered Surveyor […]
Finance Director Philip Magnus has been at W.RE for five years, where he has seen the business grow to having a total of £1.5bn of assets under management. Having studied IT at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), he began his accounting and finance career by qualifying as a chartered accountant […]
