Good morning.
Close to £8bn has been wiped from the value of the UK’s largest real estate companies over the past year.
Meanwhile, River Island’s property boss complains that landlords “don’t entirely understand” retailers and UK Hospitality boss Kate Nicholls tells landlords to “share the pain”.
“What on earth do you think they have been doing?” asks EG’s editor. Actually, real estate hasn’t shared the pain, it has shouldered it. Now it deserves to share some of the support, too.
Most of the larger REITs fell on the FTSE yesterday…
… While hospitality(£) has been the slowest sector to return to pre-pandemic levels of activity.
Frontier Dragon has chosen Knight Frank and CBRE to advise on the Diamond.
Hyde boss Peter Denton(£) is the preferred candidate to run the government’s housing agency, Homes England.
Southwark Council is going through the roof with its plans to provide social housing by building on top of its council blocks. But can it be done?
And a former retail park with consent for 448 homes in Romford, north London, has hit the market with a price tag of £35m.
But the UK’s housing supply and demand gap has yawned to its widest since 2013, says the RICS…
… As MPs warn that the government’s reforms will not make the system cheaper, faster or democratic.
Zara owner Inditex(£) has reversed its losses of last year, but is sticking to plans to close 1,200 stores(£).
Gap(£), meanwhile, is closing 19 stores(£), and may become an online-only business in the UK.
Rising prices could lead to an 1970’s-style economically impoverishing inflation spiral(£), warns Bank of England boffin Andy Haldane.
And finally, when you think of the people making fortunes from the rise of online, what clichés spring to mind? They are innovators and disruptors, right? Capable not only of thinking out of the box, but of realising that there is no box. That boxes are for squares. They are mavericks and borderline Bond villains, who spend alarming amounts of money on private space rockets. Or they are Hamid Moghadam(£). The Prologis boss has managed to turn his once derided shed REIT into a 1bn sq ft empire by housing Amazon et al, but without feeling the need to crow about how innovative he is. “We actually haven’t had a new idea since 1999,” he quips. Maybe boxes aren’t so square after all?
