Lunch last Monday week at the Coq D’Argent with the jolly David Saul, of serviced office suppliers Business Environment, ended on a serious note.
The man who runs 14 centres in London with his wry finance director, Simon Rusk, said they always ran passport and financial checks on tenants to ensure they were not crooks borrowing the address to run scams. Good job.
Four days later came ITV’s Fraud Squad. The programme captured now-prosecuted Matthew Noad and Clive Griston pressure-selling farmland to pensioners, duping buyers into believing their plot would get planning. The last time I walked past the City block shown in the programme, it was serviced offices (not run by David Saul, nor any of the big boys).
Passing on quickly to the role of the Land Registry. The duped seem to get genuine title documents. If so, the scam must have involved the genuine purchase of dozens of acres of agricultural land, which the scammers genuinely sell in hundreds of little parcels. I asked the Land Registry: do you have any way of flagging up this sort of activity to the police?
It said: “Yes, we do have systems in place to share information with the Insolvency Service and other organisations where we suspect that a collective investment scheme is in place.” Scammers beware.
New frontier for Pioneer
An arrow in the back is said to be the pioneer’s reward. Who took a quiver-full when Kennedy Wilson agreed to pay £69m for £149m of outstanding debt on Pioneer Point in Ilford, Essex, is unclear. The 35-storey scheme has been in the financial equivalent of intensive care since 2012.
What is clear, for a nice change, is the depth of the £80m write-down. Kennedy Wilson plans to turn the 293 units into rented flats. Having paid 46p in the pound for the debt, it should not be hard to make a slice of fresh equity.
What’s in a name?
Hail Savills for having the finest people-finding website, at least compared with CBRE, JLL and Knight Frank. Try searching for answers to just two questions, using the primary search box on the front page of the quartet’s UK sites.
One: Who is head of investment at (name of firm)? Two: I bumped into a guy from (name of firm) called James last week. I’ve forgotten his surname, but I remember the face. Can I find him?
At Savills both questions are answered in a flash, without even using the “people tab”, with the added bonus of being able to download an electronic “E-card”. Only downside: there are 107 employees called James: 8/10.
At JLL, ignore the “people” tab – it leads to a maze. Entering “head of investment” in the main box gets 685 results. Don’t panic. Tick people, then the right man pops up. Take the same two-step route with ‘“James” and you get 39 to choose from: 7/10.
Knight Frank: I gave up trying to find who was head of investment after a couple of minutes clicking, and ended up gazing at a lovely £30m house on the Isle of Man. Finding a “James” was easy – 60 of them appeared on first click: 6/10.
The CBRE site lacks a “people” tab. The primary search box yields no answer to either question. You find out who is head of investment by clicking through to the right department: that works fine. But finding a James is tough: 5/10.
PS: Type “Rupert” into Savills’, Knight Frank’s and JLL’s search box (CBRE’s computer says no). One pops up at JLL. Knight Frank has a dozen, Savills 14. As the latter is bigger than the former, we can hail the “poshest agent” as Knight Frank.
Google’s latest doodle
Westfield has a lab in Silicon Valley to improve the monitoring of shoppers, who apparently now occupy “phy-gital” space. (Half real, half digital – keep up). Orwell would not approve.
And Google is experimenting with “crabots” (half crane, half robot) to build a HQ for 20,000 staff in the Valley.
Think of a car assembly line robot on wheels. Then laugh. Then wonder what lunatic ideas the search engine giant is going to come up with to test the patience of Camden planners when one day, some day, it re-submits plans for its European HQ at King’s Cross.
