Newham shed squat swat squad
Council chiefs in Newham have assembled a crack squad to tackle rogue landlords in the borough that are building “super sheds” in back gardens to house tenants with very basic amenities. The council says it is investigating about 100 cases of super sheds and its new team will use aerial photography and infrared imagery to track down these shanty-style dwellings. Tough proceeds-of-crime laws normally reserved for drug dealers and gang bosses will then be used to recover cash and assets from people convicted of offences. It sounds like the plot of a new television drama
Yours for only £4,000 per sq ft
Could London’s luxury resi market really have reached its peak? First data from Savills and Knight Frank showed prices stagnating and sales declining as buyers took fright at the tough new rules on stamp duty avoidance. Now even the Candy brothers’ swanky One Hyde Park scheme could be suffering. Reports in The Times suggest the duo have instructed agents to offer inducements to shift the remaining flats. Prices have been slashed by more than a third to £4,000 per sq ft, with one recent prospective buyer even offered free parking, while another was tempted with £500,000 off the asking price. But at least one company appears not to have noticed: Berkeley Group bosses are in line for a record £280m bonus if they deliver a £1.7bn cash return to shareholders over nine years.
JLL’s case of mistaken identity
Has Jones Lang LaSalle gone into development without telling us? The head of the firm’s development and asset strategy team, Katie Kopec, was interviewed on the BBC’s Newsnight programme the other evening about the Olympic legacy. As Katie gave her views, the programmed captioned her as from “developer Jones Lang LaSalle”. Katie assures us it was “wrong and unfortunate but we have not suddenly changed”. “I don’t know what you have to do to get them to get it right. I even wrote on the back of my card ‘real estate consultant’,” she quipped.
CBRE gets its links in order
CBRE’s Scottish business suffered during the Olympics fortnight after its e-mail network caved in temporarily. Suddenly the meaning of BT’s campaign “It’s good to talk” took on more gravitas to surveyors north of the border. However, with the property industry largely retired for the summer holidays, not least during the London 2012 Games, Diary wonders whether CBRE’s e-mail traffic was actually dented by the lapse in technology? A spokeswoman for CBRE declined to comment, but Diary understands that the network was swiftly reconnected.
Cutting their teeth on the Shard?
No update on tenant activity at the Shard, but Irvine Sellar shouldn’t be worried. Notorious friend to the industry Vince “mansion tax” Cable suggests using the empty office space to help house struggling Southwark start-ups. Addressing local businesses concerned about a lack of appropriate office space, Cable reportedly said: “It’s a slightly cheeky suggestion, but you might want to ask the owner of the Shard, until he gets some commercial tenants.” Sellar’s PR team didn’t respond to requests for comment on Cable’s suggestion.
