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.
InsightWill the housing recovery last?
You know the housing market’s on the up when queues form outside posh paint purveyor Farrow & Ball.
- News
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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?
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
So much for the brighter outlook
Just when things were looking up, along came a global pandemic.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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 ...
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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”.
- Insight
Resi volumes pick up in London
Whisper it, but something seems to be stirring in the hitherto moribund London residential market. People have stopped fretting about Brexit and started buying and selling houses again.
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Death of cul-de-sac exaggerated
Typical blooming architect! Fellow PW columnist Jo Cowen recently heralded the “death of the cul-de-sac” in a tirade against housebuilders. Well I live in one and I reckon society would benefit from more culs-de-sac and less architectural hauteur.
- Insight
Brexit isn’t the real market threat
2019: it’s the year of living dangerously, not least for forecasters. I aimed to do a ‘year ahead’ piece in January, but the politicians kept moving the goalposts. Forget trying to predict how the year will unfold; writing even a week ahead of publication threatens serious pratfalls.
- Insight
Government’s housing Luvvies are all style and no substance
Everything’s been tried: Help to Buy, lifting council house building caps, modular homes. But still the government is nowhere near to hitting its target of 300,000 new homes a year. There’s only one solution. Call in… The Luvvies.
- Insight
Ideas not land are the building blocks for today’s housing entrepreneurs
“Where are the new Lawrie Barratts?” incoming housing minister Kit Malthouse beseeched his audience at Property Week’s RESI Conference in September.
