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.
InsightWall of money needs a home
“There’s a wall of money looking for a home,” a financier told me after one in a flurry of recent private equity-funded acquisitions. Where better a home for these billions than in, well, homes?
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Ditch the sou’wester for shades
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” a now newly octogenarian Bob Dylan howled in 1965’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. As for housing, you definitely don’t need an economist to know which way prices are going.
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Land scarcity sparks costs surge
Things couldn’t get rosier for the housebuilders, it would seem. Sales volumes and prices are up, irrespective of dwindling government support.
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A levelling-up boost for housing
By ‘eck, the BBC is to drag swathes of its London staff up North and the regions in the name of the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda. It’s bound to price some locals out of the market. And not just for their macchiatos.
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Why we should stick with bricks
The government’s obsession with modern methods of construction (MMC) seems to know no bounds. Even the chancellor is now a convert. However, I still harbour a heretical allegiance to the most ancient method of construction – brick.
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Cladding 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.
