Peter Bill
The outlook for property is harder to read right now than a book on Quantum Mechanics. An easier read is Alastair Ross Goobey’s column (p26).
Here, the former head of the Hermes Pension Fund says his money is going back into shares. The reason – shared by many still active fund managers – is that the FTSE is close to the bottom. Good news for all, if true.
Not so good news for property. For it means that the yearned for increase in property spending by life and pension funds is still not going to happen. Does the investment community care? Of course. But as the £202m Mayfair Place deal shows (p13), there are plenty of other investors available. Last week’s DTZ research shows lending at record levels. Anecdotal evidence says the investment market is strong. It is demand for property that remains weak. Yet there is no sense of a slide into the abyss, more a rather tedious bumping along a foggy bottom.
This motion is clearly beginning to hurt, as the results of Fletcher King show (p23). The lack of transaction business must be hurting others not forced to reveal their results. But counterbalancing this is a fairly steady consultancy market.
Come September, the 2003 budgets will start to be constructed. Good luck with the guessing, for that is what it will be.
Asset seizure Act will uncover more than property crimes
Best of luck to the Brighton councillors who want Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s properties sequestered and given to a housing association (p19).
Nobody is sure just how many flats and houses this bad/mad man owns in the area. But seizing the assets of a rich property developer convicted of manslaughter, and using them to benefit the poor and homeless, appeals.
It is a topic that should now appeal to the property industry. Here’s why – a Bill called the Proceeds of Crime has just received royal assent. Now, an Assets Recovery Agency is to be set up.
It will have the right to seize property that any convicted criminal has acquired as a “benefit from the conduct” of what is defined as a “criminal lifestyle”. It is easy to see criminals wriggling free of this rather loose definition.
In van Hoogstraten’s case, was he a property dealer who built up an empire by skating close, then over the edge, of the law; or was he a criminal who could not have paid for his properties without indulging in “a criminal lifestyle”.
That is for the courts to decide, if it ever gets that far. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to remember this new legislation. Assets sold and then seized will benefit from the full glare of court publicity.
