Good morning,
Today is the day we find out who is going to be the new Tory prime minister. Most of us are pretty sure who. What no-one really knows is how much of what was promised before won’t be delivered and exactly what will.
Will we see levelling up abandoned? Will Rees-Mogg really become minister for levelling up? Does anyone really know what levelling up is? Doesn’t sound like anyone in Stoke does, anyway.
Whether real estate will get heard more or taxed more will start to be seen over the next few days, but for now – despite the headwinds – the sector continues on.
In the residential sector, housebuilder Vistry is understood to be plotting a bid to takeover its £1bn rival, Countryside, while in Cardiff, Legal & General continues to pump money into the BTR sector with the purchase of a former brewery site where it plans to build more than 700 new homes.
Landlords of less professional rental products could find themselves with rent arrears even higher than during the pandemic, however. According to figures from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, one in 10 tenant households in England will fall behind on rent in this financial year – one-third higher than during the pandemic.
Things are tough in the retail sector, too, especially if you are an energy intensive supermarket focused on frozen foods. For Iceland, rising energy costs are really starting to hurt. So much so that managing director Richard Walker is considering shutting shops and mothballing expansion plans because it’s just too costly to operate.
Discount chain Matalan has also instructed advisers to investigate a sale as it seeks to raise £100m of fresh equity to counter the demise of the high street, while naughty Waitrose has been forced to undo the restrictive covenants it had in place across several of its property deals.
And in the world of digital, the FT takes a look at how agents want to tap a growing pool of buyers looking to convert their cryptocurrency into bricks and mortar and Saudi sovereign wealth fund the Public Investment Fund has launched a company to digitise and develop the local real estate sector. The National Real Estate Registration Services Company will work with the Real Estate General Authority and other government entities to build a comprehensive real estate registration database covering data on property units in Saudi Arabia.
But while there may be quite a bit of doom and gloom out there for a Monday morning – with reasons for that laid out in the latest EG Like Sunday Morning podcast – EG can’t let you start the week without a little joy.
Historic England has bought a 1700s-built property in Shropshire that was the grandfather of skyscrapers back to life. This unassuming maltings was the first to use an internal frame of iron columns. Without it, iconic skyscrapers around the world wouldn’t have been able to be built. Like the Shard, and then what would adrenaline junkies like Adam Lockwood do for their kicks on the weekend?
Happy Monday.
