Property has had a largely dismal time in the past 18 months. Some of the UK’s biggest REITs reported £7bn of losses for the year to 31 March, several open-ended funds threw in the towel and there was the realisation that government was on the side of the tenant, not the landlord.
The received wisdom is that the planning system is to blame for the shortage of housing that we face in the UK. This is patently wrong and needs challenging.
One positive thing to emerge from the first stage of this coronavirus rewiring is that institutional investors and forward-thinking fund managers have not forgotten previous commitments to environmental, social and corporate governance.
Getting the UK property industry to deliver and measure true social impact, as a cogent part of their wider stakeholder strategies, is proving much more difficult than Property Week and Newcore had envisaged when we launched the Pro Bono Challenge at RESI last September.
Newcore Capital and Property Week are launching The Pro Bono Challenge at RESI this month.
At Newcore, we are out twisting the arms of the wealthy and generous of Oxford and the South East to raise £3m of extra funds to regenerate a church, crèche, café, drugs outreach and community centre in one of the poorest parts of Oxford.
In the last tech boom of 1998-2000, UK property investment went out of vogue as investors flooded to risky but novel technology and internet companies, many of which had strategies that were hard to understand.
Recent events have provided further evidence of the ideological and socio-economic divide that exists today in the UK.
As investors in social-infrastructure-related property, we spend a lot of time dealing with D1 use classes - education, healthcare and the like - and the conversion of religious and community-led buildings (also D1/D2) to such uses.
With investment in alternatives on the rise, there are opportunities across all elements of the risk spectrum.
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