Good morning. Let’s plunge the cafetiere and get down to business, shall we?
A legal wrangle over the UK’s largest regeneration site has ended in a £1 deal. Three Thai banks, which ended up saddled with 840 acres of the South Tees(£) after SSI UK went bust have finally decided that the South Tees Development Corporation are welcome to it.
Meanwhile, a £1bn slate of developments will Britain’s most famous shopping street become a residential area. Oxford Street is set to get an additional 500 homes(£), which is double the number of stores.
Shoppers are returning to the high street(£), though. Last month’s 0.9% lift in sales is even more impressive if you take fuel out of the equation. (Just don’t do the same with food!)
Plans for the £1.3bn redevelopment of Edinburgh’s seafront have been unveiled…
While plans for the £3.6bn refurb of the Palace of Westminster have hit a snag, after Historic England demanded to know why(£) the grade II* Richmond House was being gutted to house MPs.
And the housing ministry has lashed out at councils, saying that one in seven planning applications is dogged by delays(£). The councils have retorted that maybe that wouldn’t be the case if there wasn’t a £19.1bn funding black hole(£).
Expect those delays to get worse as the focus moves to flood risk(£). As many as 70,000 new homes built in high flood-risk areas are potentially uninsurable.
Meanwhile, the gap between monthly rent costs and mortgage payments has narrowed to is slenderest in a decade(£). (Although, there are areas of the UK where one in four properties is an Airbnb.)
But eager members of generation rent won’t have to wait long to move into the Tower Works in Leeds, after the long awaited 245-flat build-to-rent scheme was given approval by Leeds council.
In the digital world, former Rockspring boss Robert Gilchrist is one of a tranche of angel investors backing proptech app Dashflow…
… And EG talks to Bill Ruh, the man who taught tech to Lendlease.
Also in this week’s EG, our esteemed editor asks how much truth there is to the chatter that the market is back. Is it cyclical, Sam? Or is that just ‘cynical Sam’?
A third of new jobs over the last decade have gone to London(£), despite it having only 16% of the population.
And Victoria’s Secret is no longer just secret – it’s private! Private equity firm Sycamore Partners and L Brands(£) have taken the lingerie retailer private in a $1.1bn deal, which will do a little to help its $5.5bn debts(£).
And finally, a word to the wise. If you are going to maintain that – despite your £160m property business, your numerous £1m-plus villas, your £1m parties and bailouts from your millionaire dad – that you are ‘penniless’ so you don’t have to pay the mother of your three children any maintainance, don’t boast about your fabulous luxury lifestyle on social media. A court has found that Preston Haskell IV will have to pay his former wife, Alesia Vladimirovna, a total of £5.7m (£), after it was shown pictures of his jet-setting lifestyle that didn’t quite match his story of extreme financial hardship. Poor little Preston.
