Good morning,
Qatari Diar has sold its 22% stake in Get Living to Aware Super, an Australian pension fund. It was asking between £400m and £500m for the stake.
Blackstone has agreed terms for a £700m final offer for Industrials REIT.
And the future of Marks & Spencer’s London HQ is in the balance, as the retailer announces another wave of job cuts.
March saw the share prices of top real estate REITs take a tumble as the MSCI Europe Real Estate Index hit its lowest level since 2009.
Planning applications in England have fallen by 14% to their lowest level on record. The stats were dumped by officials at the end of last week in a flood of more than 150 documents, in what has been described as “take out the trash day”.
The housing system in Britain is broken, Michael Gove has said, as he admitted that the government’s attempts to solve the crisis had so far been piecemeal. The levelling up secretary made the comments in the foreword to a collection of essays on housing from think tank Bright Blue.
Incidentally, house prices fell in March for the seventh month in a row, and by more than economists expected.
Meanwhile, East Midlands Conservative MPs have written to Gove to complain that his “trailblazer” devolution deals for the West Midlands and Manchester will create a two-tier system that risks leaving huge swathes of the country behind.
And eight universities in the Midlands have launched a £250m investment vehicle to fund companies “spun out” from research, which it plans to tie in to the region’s investment zone plans.
In other news, Transport for London has chosen Barratt as its joint venture partner for its 900-home site at Bollo Lane in Acton, west London.
Hammerson has made €164m from the sale of its stake in the Italie Deux shopping centre in Paris.
Ken McCullagh will step down as UKCM‘s chair at the end of the year, handing over to Peter Pereira Gray. The REIT’s results published today show a fall in NAV of £300m to just over £1bn.
GPE has completed leasing at 70/88 Oxford Street, signing The Fragrance Shop.
Property tycoon Nick Candy is locked in a bitter legal dispute with former business partner Robert Bonnier.
Simon Horan, head of residential in Birmingham at JLL, has left the agency after six years in the role.
Clyde & Co partners Anabelle Redman and Will Deeprose and Real Estate Balance managing director Sue Brown share their thoughts on the ED&I issues facing real estate.
The Times (£) takes a look at the booming life sciences sector.
And finally, you can catch up with yesterday’s episode of EG Like Sunday Morning, which covered the changes to EPCs and business rates that landed on 1 April, as well as the long-awaited consultation on the Landlord & Tenant Act.
