Alastair Stewart
Alastair Stewar has almost 30 years experience of the construction industry as equities analyst, journalist and columnist. He writes a monthly column on the residential market for Property Week and sits on the housebuilding panel of the Experian Construction Forecasting Committee.
InsightCladding victims get stung again
The headlines were improving for Number 10. Britain’s vaccine roll-out was, as Ursula von der Leyen admitted, a ‘speed boat’ to the EU’s ‘tanker’ and Boris was seen as having relocated his mojo.
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Even the Black Death had its silver lining
The lights are once more going out all over Europe. But the darkest hours in pandemics have often heralded glorious dawns. The horrors of the Great War and even deadlier flu gave way to the Roaring Twenties; the vast social changes wrought by the Black Death ignited the Renaissance.
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Pandemic? What pandemic?
“Tis the season to be jolly careful,” the once ebullient Boris Johnson cautioned the nation, confirming the second lockdown would end in tiers.
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Corporate bids back in housing
You wait years for corporate bids in the housing sector and then at least three come along at once. Could it be the late noughties all over again?
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Office life needs a radical rethink
I recently spent the two least productive days since the start of lockdown. I went back to the office.
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Will the housing recovery last?
You know the housing market’s on the up when queues form outside posh paint purveyor Farrow & Ball.
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The winds of change are blowing
Persimmon, the UK’s most valuable housebuilder, has long been a hit with shareholders but anathema to politicians, journalists and rivals – who have portrayed the York-based group as synonymous with executive excess, shoddy workmanship and corporate arrogance.
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How Tony Pidgley built London
Berkeley Group founder Tony Pidgley was, along with Sir Lawrie Barratt, one of the two giants of modern housebuilding – an industry they both, in differing ways, were largely responsible for fashioning.
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Is the PM going to call in the cavalry?
What does Taylor Wimpey CEO Pete Redfern know that the rest of the embattled housebuilding sector doesn’t? The UK’s second-biggest developer is back in the land market. Could it have had the heads-up that Boris is about to call in the cavalry?
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Light at the end of the tunnel
We’ll build again. But, even after the PM’s exhortation for construction workers to be “actively encouraged” back to site, it’s not entirely clear where or when. One thing’s clear, though: nothing will ever be quite the same in property.
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The cash preservation society
“Cash is king.” Never has that well-worn business maxim been more imperative than now, as the country locks down in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.
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So much for the brighter outlook
Just when things were looking up, along came a global pandemic.
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London estate agents make hay
“We’re now going to sealed bids on houses that we couldn’t get a single viewing for a few months ago.” This view from a south London estate agent is no flash in the pan. After many months in the deep freeze, the capital’s housing market seems to have thawed.
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Boris has redrawn property map
Boris Johnson’s election victory was as much of a landslide in tectonic terms as political. Britain’s regional red and blue plates have not so much slid as flipped and the aftershocks could reverberate across the property market for years to come.
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Can we crack modular housing?
For decades, modular housing has been the sector’s equivalent of nuclear fusion: the imagined fount of limitless supply has always been just over the horizon… but never quite within reach.
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Brexit chaos hits housebuilders
The Muppets, sorry, members of parliament have connived against leaving the EU by today and the chaos our self-serving representatives have visited upon the land is already evident in a slew of profit warnings from some of the housing sector’s hitherto most dependable operators.
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Call time on our Brexit purgatory
“JUST GET ****ING ON WITH IT!” Not the war cry of a hardline Brexiteer, but the plaintive refrain (give or take the adverb) from some dozen property people I’ve chatted to over the past month or so – all of whom voted remain, but now long to get on with ...
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CPOs: a four-point mini manifesto
Compulsory purchase orders are “as close as the property industry gets to an authoritarian state”, according to a widely respected contact in the residential sector, who is no stranger to CPOs. My view: they should be used sparingly. But they should be used.
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Kier should look back not forward
Kier doesn’t need ‘Future Proofing’ (the title given to its largely ineffectual turnaround programme). It needs past-proofing, or at least recent-past-proofing.
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Out with the new, in with the old
Purplebricks, the “world-leading hybrid estate agency” has, it admitted on 7 May, “made sub-optimal decisions in allocating capital”. That’s the best euphemism I’ve seen for “lost money”.
