Not for the first time, carefully planned launches and meetings at MIPIM were disrupted by unconnected events.
The arrest of Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz as part of an investigation into the collapse of Icelandic investment bank Kaupthing dominated Cannes conversations.
Two big questions were asked. The first: would Vincent’s Thursday night party – aboard his yacht Veni, Vidi, Vici – still go ahead. The answer to that, as EG went to press, was “yes”.
The second: could it really be a coincidence that the brothers were arrested as the industry rose for the busiest day of the biggest event in property? You can supply your own theory in answer to that. It may well concur with the view that was held by most of those at the show.
But there was no sense that these sideshows would overshadow the main event. A sense of momentum was palpable – particularly in London. And if some craved breakthroughs, most talked optimistically of a year that could be the inverse of 2010, when a strong first half was followed by a quiet second.
The potential barrier to a quiet first half turning into a positive second this year isn’t money. It’s stock.
Little good quality product is available, and that which is coming to market is too secondary to persuade the few active lenders that are around to provide debt financing.
“As frontline services are cut across the UK, council leaders escape to the south of France,” thundered the Daily Mail on Thursday. “Manchester council spends £60,000 to send 13 officials to property conference in Cannes… a week after announcing closure of libraries and swimming pools.”
It was familiar fare.
Undoubtedly, previous MIPIMs have borne witness to public sector excess.
Local authorities that were never going to appear on an international corporate’s list of investment destinations spent handsomely to try to persuade them otherwise.
It was never sustainable in these austere times. But the Mail’s line – and not just the Mail, in fairness – that a city such as Manchester should not be promoting itself at an event like MIPIM is plain wrong.
To urge the public sector to be more business-like, to be more pragmatic and to work in a collaborative way with the private sector, and then to simultaneously hang it for, effectively, doing just that, is contradictory at best.
To personalise it, to hold Manchester leader Sir Howard Bernstein up as a business-friendly paragon of civic leadership and then to attack when he does just that is absurd.
Go further, and it is possible to create an argument that the public sector is under-represented.
To fully capitalise on the billions of pounds of public sector cash ploughed into the Olympic project, private sector investment is vital. And with this coming Tuesday marking the 500-days-to-go milestone, the Olympics felt underrepresented at MIPIM.
That’s not to say the public sector is undeserving of criticism. No one is above it. But to be so broad-brush is, for want of a stronger word, silly. And ultimately self-defeating.
In last week’s Estates Gazette Power List, we ranked the iPad at number 50, dubbing it the Trojan horse that has finally persuaded property to trust technology. Given how many property professionals used it to show off their wares at MIPIM, it should have been higher. We may well look back at MIPIM 2011 as a technological turning point.
And EG’s digital daily magazines went down a storm as well. And our interactive web seminar saw – for the first time – a UK audience able to ask questions of a Cannes panel. It’s all still available at www.estatesgazette.com .
