Has real estate really moved so slowly since Elizabeth II took the throne?

EDITOR’S COMMENT There are many wonderful things about EG (I don’t need to tell you that), but among the most wonderful is our vast history and deep archive. Being more than 160 years old, we have the ability to delve back into the past and get a unique view of the real estate sector. To see it through old eyes as well as new.

This week, we went rummaging through the archive – all of which, bar one missing volume, is available to us here at EG Towers (the whole lot is at the British Library if you want to go full EG nerd) – to find out what the big issues of the day were when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned.

Turns out the issues the sector faced haven’t really changed much. Seventy years ago, the industry was calling for an urgent review of the rating system and modifications to our leasehold structure. Today, the industry still calls on government to change the rating system, and those calls continue to fall on deaf ears. And the need to completely change the Landlord and Tenant Act? Well, we all know how vital that is. But have we heard anything since the review was quietly announced in December 2020?

Poring back over the pages of “The Estates Gazette” is both a joy and a worrying reminder of how slowly this industry can move if it doesn’t move together and with purpose – and perhaps with a firm, but friendly, shove in the right direction from a well-meaning kind old comrade.

Leaders from across the sector gathered to contribute to the coronation issue, sharing their views on the market. The then newly installed president of the RICS, George Arnold Coombe, was full of ambition for the sector, convinced that it was entering an “era more pregnant with possibilities” than ever before.

I wonder what Coombe would think of the RICS today? Whether he would think that it had seized the opportunities presented to it over the past seven decades and enabled the profession to prosper. Would he look back today and think he was correct when he said we had “men and women available not only to devise solutions to our problems, but to carry them into effect”?

The calls from leaders, even 70 years ago, were for real estate to be more proud of its purpose – to showcase more strongly the change that it can effect on a place, a people and a planet.

The words of Myles Francis, president of the Chartered Auctioneers’ and Estate Agents’ Institute, resonate strongly today. They are words I could easily hear tripping off the tongue of some of the more enlightened among this sector.

“I call on those who look to the [institute] for leadership to take the coronation as an occasion for reflecting on the influence their work can have on the health, prosperity and happiness of their fellow citizens,” he said.

It is encouraging, isn’t it, that these were the views of men (we had no female columnists back then, it seems) all those years ago. But it is so frustrating that this is still not the view that most people have of this most wonderful of professions.

Seventy years have gone by and still we have not shifted the dial far enough.

I am encouraged, however, that the dial has shifted more over the past few years than it has during most of the period since the Queen took to the throne all those decades ago, but we need to pick up the pace so that when the next editor (plus a few, perhaps) goes back through the archive of EG in the 21st century they do not feel the tinge of sadness we did looking back.

I’m quietly confident they won’t. I’m confident because we have new real estate professionals – like the six who will be taking to the stage next Thursday (9 June) at our Future Leaders event – who understand the unique power that the sector has to effect change. With people like them on real estate’s throne, we can’t possibly fail to progress, right?