Good morning.
Nearly 15m sq ft of “super shed” floorspace has been added to the market, as a direct result of the boom in online shopping.
Meanwhile, CBRE’s Trammell Crow has paid a record £2m per acre(£) for Arcadia’s site in Milton Keynes, which it plans to flatten and replace with three more super sheds.
Canadian asset manager BMO will announce plans this week to float its Responsible Housing REIT(£) in London, which buys up housing for the vulnerable and disabled.
The house price boom(£) has become a liability for the chancellor, adding billions to the cost of servicing the UK’s debt.
And young people are now less likely to own their own home before starting a family(£).
That’s partly because banks(£) have realised that buying up properties to rent out(£) themselves is a more attractive source of income than lending mortgages.
Protests are growing across London against plans to build thousands of new council homes on green spaces and existing estates.
Meanwhile, residents in Cornwall are miffed that the council is housing the homeless in portable bedsits(£).
L&G is among a consortium of investors throwing in with the Duke of Northumberland’s plans to by Teesside’s PD Ports(£).
And they’re off! BT will be the first major company this week to make it clear that it wants staff to get back to the office(£). And it won’t be long before other big players follow suit.
The Issa brothers say they will open more than 300 Asda convenience stores(£) across their EG Group forecourts empire, as well as more small stores on high streets and retail parks.
But five years since BHS vanished from the high street, a fifth of the stores are still empty.
Heineken plans to spend £38m revamping(£) its suburban pubs estate.
And finally, when is a garden not a garden? When it is a “mixed-use” attempt to duck a £1m tax bill. Nael Khatoun is determined to get a rebate from the tax man(£) on the purchase of his £9.4m townhouse on Chelsea’s Tedworth Square. The Oaktree Capital boss bought the handsome house in 2018, paying an equally handsome £1.3m in stamp to the Treasury. But now he reckons he should have some of that back, because the square’s communal gardens, to which he has access, are not in fact gardens at all. No, Khatoun’s team has uncovered evidence of a cafe operating beneath the broad-leaved limes and mature plane trees! And this, they say, makes his purchase mixed-use, not residential, reducing the tax bill from 15% to 5%. Ha! Quad erat demonstrandum! Sadly, his attempts so far have not been successful, seemingly because no other resident has been able to confirm the existence of the mysterious cafe. Perhaps a shrewd move would be for Khatoun to set one up himself? It would cost a lot less than £1m.
