What do investors want right now? Which are their preferred opportunities, and what do you need to know about them? This series sums up what one European investment adviser has gathering in his virtual wanderings. For over 20 years, my role has offered me the opportunity to visit, almost continuously, property companies, strategic investors, asset […]
REITs are split ever more markedly into the strong and the weak, with offices set to join retail on the wrong side of that divide – meanwhile, at last I’m getting a lie-in. Testing times indeed. I’ve written here before about the bifurcation of performance within the quoted REIT sector into the haves and have-nots; […]
In the 1990s, the South African property market was largely directly owned and managed by insurance companies and pension funds, while the listed market was in its infancy at the time. But over the last two-and-a-half decades, the landscape has shifted 180 degrees. The listed market has ballooned from owning R1.5bn of South African property […]
What policy approach can support the advance of post-Brexit Britain both nationally, especially in our northern regions, and globally? Contrarily, my starting point is Asia. Vietnam, a fertile coastally populated medium-sized nation near to the size of the UK, has a growth rate of 7.5%. Vietnam is changing fast, with expanding exports of food and […]
What will be the lasting impact of the stamp duty holiday announced in July by the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak? The holiday has been great for the vast numbers of purchasers who are acquiring UK properties up to £500,000 in value. The maximum saving this provides is £15,000. The rationale for the temporary change is […]
Housing is needed. Green space is precious. And, after the coronavirus, some offices could be left empty. Anyone currently campaigning against the obvious solution of converting disused office space into housing would surely be mad? Except, that is exactly what is happening. At the end of August, a campaign group calling itself “Rights: Community: Action” (RCA) launched a […]
Summary Xaar is a relatively young and small leading-edge technology business which I bought in mid-2018 It’s a good example of how excessive R&D in highly cyclical businesses can produce bad results I sold because a 90% increase in Xaar’s share price since November means the company is no longer obviously cheap Although Xaar was […]
With yields averaging 3.35%, the asset category ‘multi-family housing’ is moving out of the ‘alternative’ sector and becoming ‘core’, according to property adviser Savills. Germany, with its disproportionately large rental market, will be the principal focus of investors, but other markets are seeing their rental housing sector growing fast, often where private ownership had traditionally […]
Viewpoint from a regional investment agent: As I sit in my actual office, in front of my actual PC, I reflect on the first half of 2020 as a Bristol based investment agent, and conclude it was pretty much as expected and reflective of the UK investment market as a whole. In short, it was […]
This article was originally published on 8 August 2018. Fitting in as a fifty-something in a country so diametrically different from one’s own is no easy thing. Apart from the obvious; you know, driving on the wrong side of the road, cars having no indicators (at least seemingly so), magnets fitted to front and rear […]
