An interesting week: DTZ spends £24m buying half of a US investment agent (p44). Jones Lang LaSalle spends a whole lot less buying Thames Valley agent Rogers Chapman and announces that 400 of its staff are off to work in Canary Wharf next year (p29). But most interesting of all is the news that Cushman & Wakefield may set up a facilities management joint venture with EC Harris, a 2,500-strong consultancy firm that started out life as a quantity surveyor (p29).
It is hard to draw a unifying conclusion from this sudden flurry of corporate activity. But perhaps it does show that these top-tier advisers are thinking outside the usual box. DTZ has long been searching for a substantive US partner, so it is a deal not very far out of the box, but it sounds sensible for that precise reason.
Ten years ago, JLL would have looked down its nose at buying a smallish firm of Thames Valley agents. Today, happily, it does not. How much JLL paid is not known: but to get 40 experienced professional staff all in one hit was presumably a price worth paying. Moving staff from Hanover Square to Canary Wharf is more contentious. Owner Morgan Stanley may not think so, but property agents still view Canary Wharf as a bit off pitch. JLL will have to do a lot of convincing to persuade the consignees that they are not moving to a back office. Yet who knows? Maybe other surveying firms will follow suit.
Finally, who would have predicted that what was Healey & Baker would hitch up with QS EC Harris? This is a bit unfair on both firms, which have moved on: a global FM venture sounds like a good idea. But there is loose talk of the pair merging: be careful of the culture gap – and recall that the ghost of Chesterton’s disastrous purchase of QS Cyril Sweett has yet to be laid to rest.
In May 1996, EG reported (p208) that J Sainsbury was to step up its store opening programme because it was falling behind rivals Tesco and Safeway, who had built twice as much space in the previous year. In May 2006, the Office of Fair Trading makes it fairly clear (p34) that it wants the Competition Commission to curb the 10-year land grab that followed. It is clear from the OFT report that Tesco and the others, somewhere along the line, morphed from a policy of expansionism to protectionism, aided and abetted by a planning system that tacitly encourages that aim.
The Competition Commission has a couple of years to reach its own conclusions on the wider issue of anti-competitive practices. So, for those property specialists who deal with the big supermarkets, not a great deal will change in the short term. But in 10 years’ time it may be possible to look back and see that 2006 was the point at which this quartet’s UK property expansion began to falter and that, by 2016, some fresh names will have been encouraged by changes in the social climate and the planning system to enter this trade, which has become far too restrictive for the common good.
