My World: June 2021…

This is part of a series of articles where our contributors describe how they think things will look a year from now.

As coronavirus becomes endemic, life will never be the same. For property, it’s about repurposing assets to reflect those changes

It is now 18 months since we first heard the word coronavirus’. Looking back, it seems impossible to imagine that at one stage we believed the world would return to a pre-pandemic norm. Not for the first time, mean-reversion advocates have been forced to revise their assumptions. Benoit Mandelbrot is now regarded as a visionary, and his classic text The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward is required reading on finance courses, which now all feature chaos theory as a module.

Looking back, how did we get here, and how much was predictable?

The starting point is why we never escaped the clutch of covid to return to our pre-2020 state. There were attempts, of course, but every time the final barriers were brought down there were reports of another possible pandemic and restrictions were quickly reimposed. No politician wants to be accused again of ignoring the warning signs of covid-N+1. Some restrictions on freedom of movement for the benefit of the greater good are now regarded as an acceptable price to pay.

So, what is the new normal for real estate?