Each one of these trends is underpinned by a higher weighting afforded to individual needs, preferences and experiences – meaning that real estate developers and landlords can no longer take a cookie-cutter approach. Environment Environmental issues have been rising up the real estate agenda for some time, and rightly so. While the pandemic has focused […]
I yield to no one in my admiration for the office as a social centre, but it’s no place actually to get any work done. – Katharine Whitehorn, View from a Column (1981) The king is dead; long live the king. The dominance of centralised office space as the lynchpin of our working environment has […]
Consumers won’t turn back from e-commerce now – so what do institutional investors need to know about the logistics property market? The influence of e-commerce on the daily life of many Americans became clear to me when my 92-year-old mother was able to identify what grocery items arrived at her home by the logo on […]
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 important? Beware the bitcoin BS By Bill Blain The current […]
The likes of LA, London and Mumbai are being challenged as consumer appetites becomes more global. Media cities are hubs of creativity where films, television, and music are produced, edited, and consumed. A new analysis by Savills of media cities around the globe puts Los Angeles in the top spot – not surprisingly, given that […]
Why low bond yields may mean you need to rethink your portfolio construction. The future looks even more uncertain than usual. Normally uncertainty translates into lower asset prices. But not this time. And with the prices of all assets buoyed by abundant liquidity, we fear a traditional ‘diversified’ portfolio is not going to be much […]
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 […]
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, […]
As the pandemic disrupted life around the globe, nearly everyone’s routine changed, including the way we communicate with one another and how we send and receive data. With an abrupt shift in the way we work, and a dramatic increase of data traffic traversing the internet, it became apparent that the current infrastructure was not […]
