EDITOR’S COMMENT It’s very easy to feel pretty depressed and a little bit angry at the moment. The country is in free fall and no-one appears to be doing anything about it. Liz Truss and her band of merry men (and women) have gone rogue and we’re all doomed!
I’m catastrophising a bit of course, but my first proper holiday of the year, later this month, is to America, so the joy I was going to have of finally taking a break and sipping Manhattans in Manhattan and drinking tea in Boston has been decimated by the destruction of the pound. So let me wallow a bit.
But it’s not just me. Everyone I’ve spoken to since that infamous “fiscal event” has a touch of rage to their voice, of bewilderment.
What just happened? What is it going to do to our country, to our sector and to the people we employ? Is this a dream (nightmare)? And will we wake up soon?
We are living in a moment unlike any seen before.
I’ve used this page previously to say how important it is that we retain some of the “old guard” in the sector so the current generation doesn’t get completely blindsided by the next recession, so they don’t run around like headless chickens, screaming “we’re all doomed!” and catastrophising the whole affair.
But even that old guard is baffled.
These will be interesting times for our sector. The cost of debt is rising, the availability of debt is falling, the cost of living is going up for all but the 1%. Times will be tough. Home-grown capital and debt-dependent buyers will be scarce.
But for every down there is an up. The cheapness of our pound serves up some unique opportunities for overseas buyers. The Americans would be silly not to be upping their allocations in the UK; so too would the sovereign funds.
And EG’s sources tell us these two buying groups are definitely taking advantage of the hand they’ve been dealt, with the Gulf states increasing their allocation to real estate. Even a 1% nudge in the right direction from these funds adds billions of dry powder.
Silver linings or selling the silverware? Who knows? Certainly not me. But I’m keen to find someone who has figured it out.
So, it’s really easy to be pretty gloomy today. But one person’s decimated pound is another person’s high value exchange, so I’m going to change tack and flip the coin to something a little more enlightening.
At this time every year, a wonderful individual named Clarence Dixon – a big brain and an even bigger heart at CBRE – invites me to chair a panel of leaders from across the big agency firms to speak honestly about the progress (or not) real estate is making on its EDI journey.
Without fail, I always come away from this session with CBRE’s Ciaran Bird, JLL’s Stephanie Hyde, Cushman & Wakefield’s George Roberts and Savills’ Richard Rees feeling a little bit brighter.
The movement we all want around equality and inclusion in our sector is always more than what we’ve actually achieved, but for me this session isn’t really about how far we’ve come. It’s about owning how far we have to go and working together to figure out the next steps – big and small.
And even more important than that is what this event enables in the here and now. I’ve been chairing it for four years, and year after year the audience gets louder, asking more questions, demanding more answers. And each year the panel listens harder, shows more vulnerability and learns more.
We make a list of actions every year, and every year they’ve ticked them off. No giant leap, but definitely steps in the right direction. And when the doom and gloom of politics and the economy gets a bit too much to bear, it’s these small steps, by our industry, in the right direction, that keep me focused.
I hope they do for you too. Hold on tight. We’ve got this.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
