January was clearly a very busy month for Robert Jenrick. The department’s mad dash to rush through Richard Desmond’s £1bn Westferry Printworks development has been well-documented, courtesy of a 200-page document of texts and emails.
And now MHCLG’s commitment to transparency sheds further light on the rest of the month. Newly released meetings for the minister reveal a packed diary, with meetings from the Bank of England to housebuilder Persimmon to Commercial Business Real Estate.
And just two weeks after the controversial 1,524-home approval, the housing industry was jostling to meet the minister. According to the records, planning lobbyist Thorncliffe (also connected to Desmond) held a stakeholder meeting with Jenrick on 29 January, with attendees reportedly including “investors, developers, builders, councils, trade bodies and representatives of the property industry”. That doesn’t leave out many; Diary’s invite was surely lost in the post.
Of course this should come as no surprise, who doesn’t love a pro-development minister? We look forward to the next report detailing the minister’s activities in the second quarter and suspect he may have been slightly less popular.
Ode to an Om
The former home of poet William Wordsworth has been sold to a Buddhist charity.
The Grade II listed Alfoxton Park Hotel estate near Bridgwater in Somerset was sold by Christie & Co with an asking price of £2m. The 18th century, 17-bedroom pile, set in 51 acres of garden and deer park, has quite the past.
It also housed American troops during World War II, and Wellington House School in Kent relocated to the main house during the conflict. The original house, The Manor of Alfoxton, mentioned in the Domesday book, was unfortunately destroyed in a fire but was rebuilt on the same site in 1710.
It was home to Wordsworth and was the location of the first reading by Samuel Taylor Coleridge of the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The house was most recently used as a country hotel. However, planning permission was granted for conversion to a grand stately home, though this has now lapsed.
The Alfoxton Park Trust, the Buddhist charity that has bought the property, plans to sympathetically renovate the buildings and use them as a Buddhist retreat, focusing especially on a mixture of longer meditation retreats, arts and creativity events and land-based working retreats.
Trustee Lokabandhu said: “Once the building has been restored to at least something of its former glory, we’d love to welcome poets, pilgrims and lovers of nature – many of whom already pass by as they walk the Coleridge Way, which runs right past our back door.”
The power of PR
Kudos to Cushman & Wakefield for shouting about making it on to Forbes’ list of the best American employers for women. The firm should be proud.
And a look at its board of directors does show a pretty equal gender balance. What the release doesn’t reveal, however, is that Cushman & Wakefield was ranked 292nd out of 300. Not that we should take away from the achievement; there is just clearly lots more work to do, as chief human resources officer Michelle Hay points out.
Women represented 39% of C&W’s total workforce in 2019 and 43% of new hires. The highest ranking global agent on Forbes’ list was JLL at 66th position.
CBRE wasn’t on the list. Let’s hope we see it and many more from the sector high up on the rankings for 2021.
Corrie’s Barlow coins it in
It must have been at least a month since an e-mail has pinged into Diary’s inbox with “data” around how much value fictional characters have gained on their properties. But it is the silly season, so while it’s clearly not hard news, we’ll bite.
So, Barrows & Forrester tells us which soap star has made the most savvy investment over the past few decades.
Good old Ken Barlow from Corrie saw the biggest gains on his terraced house in Weatherfield. Having “bought” it in 1960 for just £1,312, the property would now be worth a whopping 11,221% more.
Not a bad ROI if it was real. But the current value of Ken’s house at £148,257 is dwarfed by that of EastEnders’ Ian Beale, who has seen the value of his Walford terrace balloon to £485,479 having “paid” £33,449 for it in 1985.
To be honest though, Diary isn’t sure that living in a soap opera makes for the best investment. The average cost of living in one of the UK’s top 10 soap opera locations is £168,423 – a rise of just 1.3% over the past month. Diary would invest in real life commercial property. The returns are much better. And the storylines too!
Introducing the Mr Whippy investment index
Earlier this summer, EG’s spectacular research lead on all things retail, leisure and logistics, James Child, produced an in-depth investigation into UK seaside towns from a real estate perspective.
Under-invested and under-appreciated, seaside towns should offer opportunities for investors and developers in an era of staycations.
EG’s report looks at how to turn the tide for seaside resorts. You can read it here. But our look into the value of opportunities to be seized from the UK’s seaside towns has started something of a trend. It’s definitely not just because we are in August. Everyone is making seaside towns the investment hot spot. Kinda.
While we at EG may look at footfall, rental tone, yield and demographics to give our view on what makes somewhere a hot-or-not spot, the guys at holiday rentals search engine Holidu have a whole different set of criteria.
They value holiday towns on average hours of sun, average temperature, number of parks, lakes, beaches, pools and (and Diary thinks this measure should be used A LOT more) ice-cream shops.
And the winner? Chichester in West Sussex.
A city full of parks, sunshine, lakes and, of course, ice cream parlours. Ely in Cambridgeshire takes second place, with Essex’s Southend-on-Sea – the most classic of seaside resorts – taking third place.
Happy campers
Talking of summer vacations, want to know what the hottest trending topic on Savills’ blog is at the moment?
It is not the future of the office, or what is going to happen to retail in this new, crazy world of ours. Nope. Some of the firm’s hottest content at the moment is “How to set up a glamping business”.
Diary has been trying to find a nice campsite to run away to for a weekend or two and is both shocked at the lack of availability (no one wanted to camp this much pre-Covid) and the increase in the cost.
According to Savills, it’s not that difficult a business to set up with relatively little capital investment required and some healthy returns. Could glamping be the next hot asset class? Are we going to see glamping REITs pop up all over the place? If so, Diary proposes we call them GITs.
