Tony Pidgley, whose Berkeley Group has been so dominant as a London housebuilder, has a new challenger to contend with. Olympic Village developer Lend Lease is to start selling new homes directly to the public.
It’s a bold move and one that won’t surprise the cognescenti. That a new player should move into the space had long been on the cards; after all, there is a desperate shortage of new homes in the capital.
That it should be Lend Lease is not unexpected either; the company is already a major developer in its native Australia.
Lend Lease hopes to be challenging Berkeley – and its main rival Barratt – within five years. It plans to build and sell up to 1,000 new homes a year in London, competing with the top two, which currently each deliver 1,000-2,000 homes a year in the capital.
Lend Lease’s motive is to capture more of the profit from development. But it should think “brand” too. Get that right and there is the opportunity for a new player – be it Lend Lease or someone else – to gain real traction.
Residential property has always been curiously brand-free in the UK, though Barratt and Berkeley may take issue with that. They are well known for sure, but are they brands?
In residential property, brands sell lifestyles, not products. The Candys do it superbly to their highly targeted market; most estate agents these days are seeking to do the same.
Yet no mid-market developer has pulled off the same feat.
Could Lend Lease? Well, its product currently has the best shop window of all. As contractor, the developer built the 2,800-flat London 2012 Athletes Village, which was sold by the Olympic Delivery Authority to First Base and a Qatari Diar/Delancey joint venture last summer. And it has the sites which will allow it to grow quickly – from Stratford’s International Quarter to Elephant & Castle.
London needs perhaps one million new homes to house – and catch up with – its growing population. Residential development needs new players with ambition, money, land – and brand.
In the week that Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude boasted of cutting the fat from Whitehall, an Estates Gazette investigation reveals councils have cut spending on property services and facilities management by almost 20% in the past three years.
On the face of it, it’s bad news for an advisory industry that is seeing growth in property management. But it offers opportunity too.
Maude said the government had saved £200m in property costs in a year. That only scratches the surface. The right pitch from this industry to accelerate those savings will fall on receptive ears.
We have been making our supplements and MIPIM daily editions available on iPad for some months now. But this week’s is the first full version of Estates Gazette to hit the tablet.
We have decided to keep the magazine format but make it better. So, if you have already downloaded our app from the App Store (simply search for “Estates Gazette”) you will have seen it available from first thing Friday morning.
And if you are reading this on iPad, you will notice links through to articles, videos and additional content available on EGi and beyond.
The most significant feature are the links through to EGi’s building reports. We hold 600,000 records on UK commercial buildings and each time one of them is mentioned in EG we will link directly through from our iPad edition. EGi subscribers who take our iPad edition will be just one click away from the most complete information service in UK property.
Please let me know what you think of the new features – and what else you would like to see the new edition offer. We will digest responses and, after this week’s taster, the full, weekly product will emerge soon.
damian.wild@estatesgazette.com
