EDITOR’S COMMENT There’s a run of stories in this week’s issue that I hope underscore a growing sense of optimism in the market. A feeling that, as more than one interviewee puts it, “the worst is behind us”.
On Tuesday I caught up with Tim Roberts, chief executive of Henry Boot, on the back of the company’s full-year results.
Tim told me he was feeling “mildly optimistic”. He seemed quite proud of being able to admit to that, adding that his PR team at FTI Consulting usually encourages him to make the effort to sound more optimistic when discussing the company’s successes. Now, they – and he – have good reason.
The company struck a string of deals over the second half of the year, both corporate and asset-based, that the team thinks will shape the next chapter of Henry Boot’s near-140-year story. Not least among those is its ongoing full acquisition of housebuilder Stonebridge. Building a business with conviction is far easier when you’re in total control, Tim said.
“What we have to do is get through this period of uncertainty, which I’m sure we will as a country and as a market, and then really show to everybody that these ingredients are going to mean we’re going to be a bigger, better and more profitable business,” Tim told me. “I’m convinced we will because we’ve been thoughtful about it and we’ve already seen good signs.”
Then there’s a round-up of Estates Gazette’s panel discussions from MIPIM (has everyone recovered by now?). You’ll find recaps of our sessions discussing capital flows, the leisure market in London, life sciences real estate investment and the need to not lose focus on diversity and inclusion.
Every one of those panels highlighted challenges in those respective areas – including the pushback against diversity initiatives coming out of the US, which I discussed in this column last week.
But I can’t point to a panellist who couldn’t find a glass-half-full attitude to what this year can hold, whether it’s City of London Corporation planning chair Shravan Joshi on the changing face of the Square Mile or Avison Young’s Dominic Amey on an upturn for office investment.
But the message I’ve really loved this week came from one of our guest columnists: Ben Henry, a director at student accommodation developer Fusion Group. It was about the hope he has for the generation of real estate professionals entering leadership positions across the industry now – in large part because of what they’ve been through since cutting their teeth in the years following the global financial crisis. “Resilience, creativity and collaboration over competition are baked into what we do,” Ben writes.
“This generation of real estate professionals is one that has had an accelerated education in the ups, downs and all-arounds of what capital markets have to show,” he said. “For that reason, we are instinctively opportunistic and collaborative, seeking to find common solutions to shared problems. That should encourage anyone into investing in the UK’s built environment.”
I love that. It’s exactly the attitude you hope tough times instil in professionals from any market, and the kind of approach industry leaders like Henry Boot’s Tim Roberts show when they look past a “period of uncertainty” for the country or their market. Being “instinctively opportunistic” is the perfect trait to have nurtured having survived cycles.
And survive them we do. Ben’s mention of the GFC made me think back to me as a fresh(er)-faced capital markets reporter, newly living in London as the financial crisis unfolded in 2007. I remember having a pint with an older, wiser scribe at the M&A-focused publication I wrote for. “This is gonna get really bad, really fast,” he said.
He’s in PR now, as it happens. Probably encouraging his client to sound more optimistic. Hopefully they have good cause not to fake it.
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