Plenty of footballers have dabbled in property. Has any made the transition seem so smooth as Gary Neville?
The former Manchester United defender this week unveiled heavyweight backers for a 500,000 sq ft leisure redevelopment of the former Bootle Street Police Station and surrounding sites in Manchester, a story broken by EGi on Wednesday.
Former teammate Ryan Giggs is onside, with the Singaporean billionaire owner of Valencia Football Club and Beijing Construction and Engineering Group also lining up for the £200m project.
BCEG – which is also backing the Manchester Airport City project – will join Peter Lim’s developer Rowsley in forward-funding the scheme, and will take majority ownership on completion.
Lim is also part of the team behind the players’ 138-bedroom Hotel Football project near Old Trafford and the three partnered previously in 2014, striking a deal to split the ownership of Salford City Football Club.
The coming together of Asian money (and considerable expertise, let’s not forget), a developer-friendly local authority (and that certainly can’t be said of all) and a footballer who is applying the same passion to the property game as he did to his own sport is a powerful combination indeed.
You may have found better ways to spend your summer than poring over European Commission competition documents. Not me. I wouldn’t say it has been richly rewarding, but this month the commission has approved CBRE’s acquisition of Johnson Controls’ Global Workplace Solutions group and formally sought responses to the DTZ/Cushman deal. Its deadline for consideration of the latter fell on Friday, meaning integration should begin next month.
Sometimes, for light relief, I visit the equivalent US regulator’s website. There I notice a CBRE filing from last week on the GWS deal. CBRE expects to realise $35m in cost savings on the back of the $1.5bn deal, with closure expected by the end of the year.
Most astonishing of all is this statistic revealed in the filing: CBRE has completed nearly 100 acquisitions in the past decade. I’ll leave that to sink in.
Chinese share prices closed on Thursday up 5%, not enough to reverse earlier losses but sufficient to calm fears of contagion. Writing in EG this week, JLL’s Asia Pacific chief executive Alistair Hughes also seeks to cool fears (p43). The Chinese property market is unlike “tumbleweed-strewn Slough in 2009”, he writes, and is “a lot more buoyant than many headlines would suggest”.
But if the Chinese Dragon is recovering, what of that other big beast, the Russian Bear?
This week’s half-year report from Raven Russia, a Guernsey-registered investor specialising in commercial real estate in the country, made for bleak reading.
Posting a portfolio devaluation of $51m (£33m), the company said its 1.5m sq ft warehouse portfolio had endured a period that “remained challenging operationally”.
Labelling the results “satisfactory” given market challenges, chairman Richard Jewson said: “We recognise that the impact of the various macroeconomic events over the past 12 months is not yet fully reflected in our results. The executive and management teams continue to do all that they can to secure long-term income from the portfolio in a turbulent market and, with the oil price and the rouble continuing to fall this week, it is unlikely that we will see any respite in the coming year.” Ouch.
If you are a REIT chief executive on holiday as falls in the FTSE drag down your share price, what do you do?
“There’s not much you can do,” one told me this week after watching the Great Fall of China from afar. “You never really switch off anyway, so you monitor the situation, arrange a call with your finance director and brokers and talk it through. But short-term moves in the share price don’t affect our underlying business.”
Unless, of course, declines continue, valuations are affected and covenants come into play. But that threat, thankfully, appears to be receding.
