Good morning.
Retirement Villages Group wants to spend £2bn of Axa’s money on 5,000 retirement homes, after securing a brace of planning permissions.
Meanwhile, Countryside Properties(£) is facing growing calls for change as activist investors build up their stakes.
Proposals to hand a former intu shopping centre in Nottingham back to nature have failed and the Broadmarsh centre will instead be transformed into New Albion Square, a £200m office development.
And Britain’s fickle weather(£) attempted to put the dampeners(£) on the reopening(£) of the high streets yesterday. But that didn’t stop The Telegraph (£) enthusiastically dubbing it Freedom Day.
Probably just as well the shoppers didn’t descend in droves – shopping at a bricks and mortar retailer is twice as polluting as buying online, according to an ‘independent’ study(£). Commissioned by Amazon.
The Great Reopening also prompted little excitement(£) on the FTSE, with the FTSE 350 edging down by 0.4%, along with falls for Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon and Capital & Regional.
The Times (£) has crunched the numbers on Regional Reit and decided that there is still plenty of life (and profit) in the office yet.
While The FT (£) offers tips on how to create the perfect home office.
Ireland’s Elkstone Partners has made its first investment in Northern Ireland with the acquisition of a site on Belfast’s Bradbury Place.
Unite Group has reported that students are showing “increased confidence”(£) by booking up university accommodation.
Delancey and Stanhope board member, Middle East envoy and former chief strategic adviser to the PM, Lord Udny-Lister(£) has apparently turned down a lucrative role with PR firm Finsbury Glover Hering “to avoid the perception of sleaze”.
And Scotland should abandon council tax(£) in favour of a levy based on actual property values, says IPPR Scotland.
And finally, what the future of work will be is a multi-trillion dollar question. Little wonder business is analysing every clue with as much scrutiny as a haruspex inspecting a cirrhotic lambs liver. But perhaps The FT (£) has taken it a little too far. It has decided that Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian new novel Klara and the Sun may have the answer. All credit to the article’s author for admitting: “Analysing it as a prospectus for the future of work is a little like dissecting Casablanca for the movie’s insights into the nightlife of wartime Morocco.” Well, quite. But just in case he is on to something and the future is bleak, then I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
