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.
InsightBoris 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.
- News
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
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.
- Insight
Autumn Budget: trick or treat?
With a distinct chill in the air and with only two days before Halloween, did an increasingly ghoulish-looking chancellor deliver more tricks or treats for the property sector?
- Insight
Theresa May dances back to the days before Thatcher’s housing revolution
Mrs T must have turned in her grave. Last week, her latest successor ushered in a return to mass council house building, undermining the defining policy of the Thatcherite revolution.
- Insight
Malthouse’s housing figures didn’t add up for industry audience at RESI
Rarely has a new housing minister inherited more of a numbers game than the latest incumbent. Problem is, numbers might not be Kit Malthouse’s strongest point. Nor his aides’.
- Insight
The tide appears to be turning for quoted housebuilders and the wider industry
Government policy and the more prosaic question of margins vied for attention during the latest round of results
- Insight
It’s best to be on the front foot if you want to ward off a PR disaster
Few chief executives could rival Taylor Wimpey’s head honcho Pete Redfern’s recent record of turning potential PR disasters into triumphs.
- Insight
Help for housebuilders but a kicking for buy-to-letters
Housebuilders got a fairly clean bill of health from the latest government-sponsored review of their industry and more good news on state support is coming, from what I hear. But spare a thought for thousands of ‘mom and pop’ buy-to-letters, who look set for another kicking from ministers.
- Insight
How much of a threat do online agents really pose to traditional players?
I wandered lonely as a geek on a virtual research tour through Putney recently, rather appropriately using Google Street View.
- Insight
Cost cutting is order of the day as rising material prices squeeze housebuilders
Some stories you just couldn’t make up. Take, for instance, failed contractor Carillion’s possible interpretation of an ‘open’ prison.
