If you had £89m…
The first mega acquisition of the post-Brexit period and it involved Manchester.
Football player Paul Pogba to Manchester United for a stonking world record £89m, to be precise.
For that money, Man U could have bought a 93% stake in Estates Gazette’s Holborn office, wag and EGi senior analyst Graham Shone points out.
Our building would be less effective in the centre of midfield at Old Trafford though, wouldn’t it?
Singing for slough
For Diary, the early years of this millennium will forever be the heyday of the corporate song.
Normally sensible businesses decided to celebrate their people, success and sheer ubiquity with a power ballad.
Accountants had a particular soft spot for crashing chords and iffy lyrics – think “Oh happy day/when Ernst & Young/showed me a better way”, or “KPMG/we’re strong as can be/a team of power and energy.”
A decade or so on, could property get in on the act? Ricky Gervais’s David Brent: Life On The Road offers the opportunity.
The mockumentary sees The Office character pursuing his dream of becoming a rock star.
It features self-penned songs such as Slough: “Like Radiohead meets Vaughan Williams. But Brent’s singing about the A4,” says Gervais.
“More convenient that a Tesco Express,
“Close to Windsor but the property’s less,
“Keeps the businesses of Britain great,
“It’s got Europe’s biggest trading estate.”
If SEGRO’s top team doesn’t book a recording studio immediately, Diary can’t be responsible for its actions.
Blue-sky thinking
Is this the most overblown CGI ever? The designers of this image for SEGRO and Aviva Investors of the Skyline Unit in Heathrow don’t just want you to know that they have signed a new prelet.
They clearly want you to look to the skies, judging from the glorious shades of pink and blue.
U say what?
Diary is as keen on modern vernacular as the next Uber-using, flat white-sipping young and upwardly mobile type, but even we were left somewhat awed by this week’s resi column from Gensler.
Still not entirely sure what an Uburb is, we considered what else could use the U treatment: how we would feel about buying an U-build flat, working in our U-ffice, or enjoying a quick one in the U-b.
TBH, sounds more like U-rgatory.
Bird with a broken wing
Anyone wondering if Ciaran Bird, managing director of CBRE UK, is as tough as he looks?
The ex-pro rugby player was unable to offer the obligatory crushing handshake when Diary turned up this week. But, we hasten to add, only because he had a recurrence of an old war wound and was wearing a sling on his right arm.
But if you doubted his steel, despite the infirmity, his son has persuaded him to join a climb of Snowdon.
Most would pass, but Bird will walk until he can go no further, he told us.
One from the archives
Do you recognise anyone in RICS’ recently resurfaced 1964 short film Chartered Surveyor, commissioned before its centenary in 1968?
The plummy narrator tells us a land surveyor is the person “we most often see as we travel about”.
See the 24-minute film for free at http://bit.ly/2aLiEvb
