"Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not." - Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)
The quote pertains to the week we have just had, and to the Deep Dive in particular. Polanyi was the Hungarian economist whose work sits underneath the whole Blue Labour project - and Blue Labour, as of tomorrow morning, sits underneath the government of the United Kingdom. His point, made in 1944, was that free markets did not spring up naturally; they were constructed, deliberately, by the state. Whether you buy that or not (I only half do, if I'm honest - the state does have to provide the structure under which the free market can thrive, only the most anarchistic of libertarians can disagree with that I think), it is the intellectual frame through which the incoming administration sees the world, and this week we got Rachel Reeves's valedictory Mansion House speech (which elicited a LinkedIn response from me I must say), a chancellor-in-waiting who wears the Blue Labour badge openly, an industry paper begging the state not to cap rents, and a Molior report showing a London new-build market where the state's fingerprints are all over the wreckage. Planned, or unplanned? We'll spend a good chunk of today's edition working that one through.
As the calendar hurtles towards a change of Prime Minister tomorrow (yes, really - Monday), our next Property Business Workshop is live and tickets are moving. October, Manchester, with myself and Rod Turner - and this one is about Joint Ventures and M&A. How to structure a JV that survives contact with reality, how to buy a portfolio (or a company) rather than a house, and how to avoid the classic partnership blow-ups that Rod and I have seen more times than either of us would like. If the next decade or more is going to be about consolidation in the sector - and I strongly believe that will be the case - this is the workshop for it. Book in at tinyurl.com/pbwoct26
Welcome back to Trumpwatch. If last week was the coronation procession - Starmer packing boxes, Burnham measuring curtains - this week the transatlantic relationship decided not to wait politely for the handover. Three stories this week, and all three of them land directly on the desk of a Prime Minister who has not actually started the job yet. Can we blame Washington for the timing? Not really - the timing is the point.
Start with the money. The Guardian revealed on Friday that Trump's State Department intends to allocate 12 million dollars to organisations in the UK founded by prominent Conservatives - the documents reviewed set out, among other grants, 7 million dollars for a think tank called 878 (not to be confused with everyone’s favourite brokerage, 978 Finance!), whose founding directors are listed as Jacob Rees-Mogg and his former special adviser Dr Radomir Tylecote, with Toby Young's orbit also in the funding frame. The stated purpose of the wider package is support for European groups the administration views favourably; former US officials have criticised it as public money being used to seek influence over foreign politics. This is, by any historical standard, an extraordinary thing - the US State Department, an institution built to project American interests through diplomacy, directing taxpayer dollars at domestic political organisations inside its closest ally. The German response gives you the temperature: Chancellor Friedrich Merz said plainly that he does not want the American government, or institutions close to it, interfering in German elections. Berlin got the same treatment in the same documents, for what it's worth.
Where does this leave Burnham? In an awkward spot before he has hung a single picture in Number 10. He said last week that he would be "very upfront" with Trump about disagreements. Well - here is disagreement number one, gift-wrapped and delivered before the removal van has left Downing Street. I suspect the response will be carefully worded concern rather than anything with teeth, because the trade relationship (of which more below) gives Washington most of the cards. But it is worth watching whether the Foreign Office summons anybody, because that would tell us how much appetite the new administration has for actual friction rather than performed friction.
Story two is the letter. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and about as close to Trump as congressional allies come, wrote to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy on Tuesday about the government's media green paper, Watch This Space, published back on 22 June. The green paper floats requiring social media platforms - Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok - to make news from public service broadcasters (the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C, Channel 5) "prominent" and "easy to find", as part of a push against misinformation. Jordan's letter calls the proposals a "major threat" to online speech and says they would infringe on the rights of American companies, warning of a tiered information system with government-legitimised outlets at the top. He has requested a formal briefing by 28 July - by which point, of course, there may well be a different Culture Secretary answering it.
Now, I'm not going to adjudicate the free speech question here - reasonable people land in different places on whether promoting regulated broadcasters is sensible curation or state gatekeeping, and both cases have been made loudly this week. What I will say is that the economics underneath the letter are the real story. The US administration believes Britain has been levying unfair charges on American tech for years - the digital services tax, the 2% levy on large platform revenues introduced in 2020, is the standing grievance, and Trump has previously threatened tariffs of up to 100% if it is not dropped. The Jordan letter is best read, as far as I can tell, not as a culture-war postcard but as another counter in an ongoing trade negotiation. When your largest trading partner's legislature starts writing to your Cabinet about your domestic media policy and citing the rights of its companies, you are not really in a media policy discussion any more. You are in a tariff discussion wearing a media policy costume.
I’ve made my thoughts on the DST very clear - the Prime Minister should be absolutely crystal clear with the President that if mega-cap companies organise their tax affairs to solely extract from our nation without paying their fair share of taxes, then we should brutally extract the tax by less efficient means such as turnover taxes like the DST. Alternatives would include taxing all of their externalities - their share of the increase in anxiety, depression, ADHD, Autism and goodness knows what else that they might be (legitimately or otherwise) blamed for - but that would take research and time, and in the interim - tax them so that their false intellectual property structures and other methods that are CLEARLY in breach of the spirit of the General Anti Avoidance Rules (if not the letter) are not enough to keep them paying an insanely low rate of corporate taxes. I’m also not sure on the company rights point - Human Rights get quoted for all sorts of parties these days (even Billionaires, it seems) - but Company Rights are less well legislated or discussed.
Story three, and briefly, because it is the most theatrical and the least consequential for us: Trump gave a primetime address from the East Room on Thursday evening announcing the declassification of a trove of documents which he says reveal vulnerabilities in American election systems, fraud, and Chinese interference, and he has ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute those he believes were involved. He used the speech to push his stalled SAVE America Act on voter registration and ID. The awkward detail: a White House official briefed reporters hours beforehand that none of the newly released material alleges any votes were switched or machines hacked, and the conservative journalist who worked on the release conceded afterwards that the intelligence community has zero evidence a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024. The declassified material itself largely restates vulnerabilities that have been publicly known for years. Midterms are in November; the speech makes rather more sense through that lens than any other. Standard Fare. Why let facts get in the way of a good old-fashioned populist argument anyway?
In terms of the ongoing Iran/Israel/USA triangle, in which we are all caught up, oil prices came back to $82.50 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate and $88.10 for Brent Crude as I update on the morning of publication here. Keep an eye on that diesel folks and the ongoing inflationary situation - and you’ll see how that’s fed into the gilt yields later on.
Why does any of this matter to a portfolio in Coventry or Chester? The same reason it always does. The transatlantic relationship sets the tariff backdrop, the tariff backdrop feeds inflation expectations on both sides of the pond, and inflation expectations feed through Treasuries into gilts and from gilts into the swap rates that price your next fixed-rate mortgage. This week the domestic political news actually pushed our yields the right way in isolation, although it wasn’t a good week - we will get to that in the gilts section - but the funding-and-letters offensive is a reminder that the incoming government's room for manoeuvre with Washington is narrower than the campaign rhetoric suggested. Burnham has promised to be upfront; the bond market will be watching how expensive upfront turns out to be. Too cynical? Perhaps. We'll see. Trump loves negotiating from a position of power but ONLY respects strength - will Burnham have what Starmer so clearly lacked in terms of gumption? Study Mark Carney, the one who is doing a reasonable job vs Trump without importing his tactics or ideology.
Phew - stepping away from the transatlantic theatre, back we go to the safety of the UK real-time property market.
As is customary, Chris Watkin has been relentlessly crunching the portal numbers, and his analysis for Week 27 of 2026 is where it is at, as always. If you want to know how the macro noise translates to the local high street, and the REAL property market on the ground, look no further.
Supply first. 34.7k new listings this week, down from 36.5k last week, against a 2026 weekly average of 37.1k and a ten-year Week 27 average of 34.6k. So the week itself was almost exactly on the long-run seasonal norm - mid-July doing what mid-July does. Another week that perhaps suggests our glut of listings - as far as how quickly the water fills the bath up - might have come to an end. The year-to-date picture is the more interesting one: 1,001,904 new listings so far in 2026, which is to all intents and purposes identical to 2025's 1,003,467 at the same point, 4.5% ahead of 2024, 12.1% ahead of the 2017-19 pre-Covid average of roughly 894k, and 12.6% above the ten-year average. A million listings by Week 27, two years running. My old ready reckoner of "10% more stock than a normal market" has needed upgrading for a while now, and here is the confirmation in black and white - we are running about an eighth above what used to count as normal supply, and it has stopped being a blip and started being the market. In my defence I have been saying “10 to 15%” for a while, and indeed 12.5% looks like the number (and you know I like to get my numbers right).
Demand side. 23.5k homes went sold subject to contract this week (23.8k last week), against a ten-year average for the week of 25.4k and a 2026 weekly average of 24.7k. Year to date, 667k gross sales - 6.9% below 2025's 717k, and yet still 0.2% ahead of 2024, 10.7% ahead of 2023, and 6.9% above the 2017-19 pre-Covid years at 624k. This is the pattern we have been tracking all year: 2026 is not a bad year for sales in any historical sense, it is simply a weaker year than 2025, which was itself a strong one. The comparison year matters enormously to the headline you write. "Sales down 7%" and "sales 7% above pre-Covid norms" are both true; only one of them sells newspapers. The 23.5k for the week sits between 2024’s 24.9k and 2023’s 21.3k - closer to ‘24 than ‘23, but it tells the story of a trappy market in the now for vendors. Not easy to sell property at the moment - 2023 was very limp and indeed prices fell that year as well, in nominal terms (before considering the massive inflation that worked its way through everyone’s wealth in ‘23!). For a shade more context - we were ahead of 2018, but behind both 2017 and 2019. Let’s not forget a nation gripped, for half a week, by world cup hopes as well - it does have an impact, but if it is temporary, we will see a bounce when next week’s figures are out (there’s a one-week lag here, so that will be in a fortnight’s time).
Net sales - gross sales less the fall-throughs - came in at 17.9k for the week (18k last week), against a ten-year Week 27 average of 19.3k and a 2026 weekly average of 19.2k. Year to date: 519k net sales, 5.3% below 2025, 0.1% ahead of 2024, 12.5% ahead of 2023, and 4.6% above the 2017-19 average of 496k. Ahead of the ten-year average on an accumulated basis too. The Five Ds - death, debt, divorce, downsizing and the diddy ones - keep the transactional engine turning whatever the mood music, and the numbers keep proving it.
Now the friction number, which is the one I would draw your eye to this week. June's exchange data: 66.2k exchanges recorded so far for the month (this will rise through July as late reporting comes in - on past trends Chris expects it to finish in the late 70ks), against 64k withdrawals recorded so far. Which means that in June, only 50.9% of the homes that left agents' books actually exchanged and completed. The other 49.1% withdrew, unsold. The seven-year average is 57.6%, and that average includes the fever-dream post-lockdown period, so the honest gap against normality is smaller but still real. Essentially a coin flip. You put your home on the market in Britain in 2026 and the odds of actually selling it, once you eventually leave the market one way or the other, are barely better than tossing a coin. I keep quoting this stat because I still find it faintly astonishing - and because it is the single best explanation of why pricing correctly on day one matters more than any other decision a vendor makes. A million listings chasing a solid-but-not-spectacular pool of buyers is a market where the overpriced simply sit, and then withdraw, and the 50.9% is the receipts. This is getting worse, not better at the moment.
What does this mean in practice? For investors, the same thing it has meant all year: this is a buyer's market by volume, with more stock, realistic-to-motivated vendors in the withdrawal pipeline, and agents who have every incentive to bring sensible offers to the table because half their book is going to walk otherwise. Would I call it distressed? No - and I'd be careful with anyone who does, because the sales volumes are above pre-Covid norms and that is not what distress looks like. It is a grinding, high-friction, well-supplied market. Those are, historically, rather good markets to be buying in, if you buy right. Not a guaranteed win - it never is - but the conditions favour the prepared. Sideways markets are the best of all as a buyer - in my experience - although it doesn’t bring that portfolio growth that we all want, expect, and are in the game for from a commercial perspective.
For more depth on all of this, watch this week's episode of the UK Property Market Stats Show, where Chris is joined by Rob Smith, boss man of Hunters, Northwood and Whitegates at TPFG: https://youtu.be/7rIjW4j6lds
Chris - this is my weekly appreciation paragraph. Thanks for what you do! If you want some help positioning yourself as a local market expert - as an estate agent or any form of property professional - give Chris a shout. Either way, give his channel www.youtube.com/@christopherwatkin a follow and some love, please!
Dust off the Macroscope, then. A quieter week for the official releases before next week's deluge (labour market Tuesday, inflation Wednesday, PMIs Friday - clear your diaries), but there's plenty to work with. GDP and construction output for May. The Rightmove rental tracker for Q2. Buy-to-let lending numbers from UK Finance for Q1. And bringing up the rear, the contract states that we have to talk about the gilts and swaps, and this was a week when they earned their slot.
GDP first. The ONS estimates monthly GDP rose 0.1% in May, taking the annual figure to 1.3% growth in the year to May 2026. The composition: services up 0.3% (and services are roughly 80% of the economy, so that is what carried it), production down 0.5%, construction down 0.8%. A return to growth after April's 0.1% contraction, and modestly ahead of expectations, which were for a flat month. So the economy is growing - slowly, unevenly, and on the back of the services sector while the physical economy shrinks. I have described this before as a 1-point-something economy that occasionally dresses up as a 2-point-something one, and May does nothing to change my mind.
The construction detail deserves its own paragraph, because it contains an interesting flip. May's 0.8% fall in construction output came solely from repair and maintenance, which dropped 2.1%, while new work actually grew 0.2%. Regular readers will remember that back in the April data the tell was the opposite - repair work holding up while new work sagged, the classic signature of a sector patching what exists rather than building what's needed. One month of new work growing 0.2% is not a trend, and I would not lean on it - the level of new work remains dismal against any historical benchmark, and the new-build EPC data (a decent leading indicator for net additions) shows a 52-week rolling total of 209,847 for England, crawling up from 209,464 the week before. Call it 210k a year against a 300k ambition and you see the size of the gap. But after seventeen consecutive months of contraction in the construction PMI earlier this year, I will take "new work stopped shrinking for a month" as the faintest of faint positives. Let's hope it persists; I doubt it will do so smoothly.
Next up - the rental market, via Rightmove's Q2 tracker. The average advertised rent outside London rose 1.9% on the quarter to a new record of £1,397 per calendar month. The more structurally significant line is this one: in Q2 2026, the number of available rental homes dropped below the previous year's level for the first time since 2022, with national availability now 1% below this time last year. Think about the sequencing there. Rental supply had been rebuilding - painfully, partially - since the 2022 nadir, and that rebuild has now gone into reverse in the first full quarter after the Renters' Rights Act came into force on 1 May. I'm not going to claim a clean causal line after eight weeks of a new regime - let me be careful here, because correlation and causation get muddled fast on this topic, and Hamptons separately reported this week that the pace of landlord sales has actually slowed since the pre-RRA rush (which fits in perfectly with the real time numbers from CW and my contention that all the surplus stock was coming from landlord disposal, or more accurately I feel I should say “landlord attempted disposal”. But the direction of travel is exactly what many of us said it would be: constrain the sector's economics and flexibility, and supply thins. Foxtons put some hard pounds on it in their trading update, reporting elevated tenancy terminations in May and June following the RRA's abolition of fixed terms - particularly in student lets - and roughly £3m of previously recognised revenue reversed as a result. One agency group, three million pounds, two months. The tenant-flexibility provisions have costs as well as benefits, and they are starting to show up in company accounts, not just in think-pieces. Big money saved in the short term for the tenant - far bigger damage long-term, is the industry conclusion.
Third sub-section - the landlord lending picture, courtesy of UK Finance's Q1 buy-to-let statistics. The average interest rate across all new BTL loans was 4.71% in Q1 2026. The average gross rental yield for the UK reached 7.21%, up from 6.93% in the same quarter a year earlier. Sit those two numbers next to each other for a moment: the average BTL purchase now yields a full 250 basis points over the average new BTL loan rate, and the yield is rising while (as we'll see below) the rate outlook is broadly flat-to-lower on the swaps. IMLA's market briefing this week made the same point from the lender side - BTL house purchase lending was 7% higher in March and April than the 2025 monthly average, with the sector supported by excess tenant demand and rising rents. So while the public conversation is all landlord exodus, the professional end of the market is quietly expanding at yields not seen in years. Many times I've pointed out the professionalisation dynamic: the amateur landlord with one leveraged flat and no appetite for regulation is leaving, and the portfolio operator is buying what they sell, at better yields, with better systems (as and when the exiting landlord will accept a haircut rather than a re-let, anyway). The Q1 data reads like that thesis in official statistics form. It would seem to be, anyway - I might be wrong about this, and one quarter of lending data is not structural proof. But it rhymes.
Gilty, or not Gilty? Gilty - although with a better shape to the week than the headlines might have suggested. The 5-year gilt closed Friday at 4.527%, and the 30-year at 5.676%. The week's shape told the story: yields started Monday at the week's lows, spiked hard on Tuesday - the 30-year touched the low 5.70s intraday - as hostilities resumed in the Middle East and the market chewed on chancellor uncertainty, and then spent Wednesday through Friday settling back down as the Mahmood-to-Number-11 reports firmed up. Net-net the 5-year finished roughly 7 or 8 basis points higher on the week, with the long end up a touch more, but the intraweek recovery was the real signal. For context on where we sit in the bigger picture: the 52-week range on the 5-year is 3.668% to 4.779%, and on the 30-year 5.033% to 5.877% - so we are in the upper reaches of both ranges, well off the panic highs, and materially above where we were twelve months ago.
The decomposition matters this week, because we had two culprits operating on different parts of the curve. The Middle East resumption is an oil story, and oil stories hit the short end and the belly - they are about inflation over the next one to three years and what the Bank does about it. The Chancellor question is a borrowing story, and borrowing stories disproportionately hit the long end - they are about how many gilts the market will be asked to swallow over a decade. Tuesday's spike had both hands on it; the Wednesday-to-Friday recovery was almost entirely the second hand relaxing. The market had been fretting, openly, that Burnham might hand the Treasury to a more fiscally expansionary candidate - Ed Miliband's name kept coming up and he was a big betting favourite as I spoke of on social media - and the briefing that Shabana Mahmood is, in the words of one person familiar with the plans, nailed down for the job, was received as reassurance. The rumour is that the cost of Miliband, as far as the bond markets saw it, was going to be significant and that would put everyone behind the 8-ball before they started. Don’t forget Burnham came 4th in the Labour Leadership Election that saw Ed “Wrong Brother” Miliband take it back in 2010, so I don’t suppose AB feels like he owes EM much. Gilt yields edged lower on the reports of Shabana and sterling touched a one-year high against the euro. Make of it what you will that the bond market's idea of good news is now "the Home Secretary is getting the Treasury" - even if she has very little formal economic experience - but the pricing is the pricing, the markets aren’t ideological and they don’t lie (although they often trade on emotion rather than fact).
The swaps: the 5-year SONIA swap sat at 4.23% and the 3-year at 4.18% as of Friday morning's update. Both a touch higher on the week, tracking the gilt move, and both still sitting comfortably below the 5-year gilt - the market continues to price the medium-term rate path below the government's term funding cost, which is the quiet vote of no confidence in the fiscal arithmetic that I have been banging on about for months. For mortgage pricing, this fortnight's stability around the low 4.2s keeps the best 5-year fixes roughly where they are (6% or just above, without arrangement fees being amortized - you can get those rates down of course by paying a 5% fee or whatever, limited company - for personal name, clip about 1% off that at the cost of a section 24 penalty of course); I would not expect meaningful repricing either way until we see Wednesday's CPI print and, more to the point, the new Chancellor's first words about the autumn Budget.
And the rates conversation? Still flipped. The market-expectations data has the one-year-ahead Bank Rate at 4.28% as of 15 July, up from 4.25% a week earlier - against a current Bank Rate of 3.75%, held since December. The market continues to price the next move as up, not down, more than a full year after the last cut. Two clips up are coming, according to the market - and as the Middle East situation rumbles on, the next rate rise becomes ever more likely. Where do we want this figure to be? Lower, obviously, if you are carrying debt - but I would settle for stable, because stable is what lets deals get underwritten. The MPC meets again at the end of the month; the vote split, after June's 7-2 with Greene and Pill dissenting for 4.00%, is the thing to watch. My suspicion remains that the hold camp keeps its majority through the summer, with the hawks needing an ugly services inflation print to grow their numbers - but I hold that view loosely, and Wednesday could change it. Is it a 6-3? That’s a live runner right now.
OK. Here endeth the lesson on current rates - here comes the Deep Dive.
Where are we going this week? Four sources, and for once they curate themselves. On Tuesday night Rachel Reeves stood up at Mansion House and delivered what everyone in the room understood to be a farewell address. By Friday, Andy Burnham was Labour leader, with the Home Secretary reportedly nailed down as his Chancellor and the Blue Labour tendency - a school of thought most of the country has never heard of - suddenly holding the great office that REALLY matters for our world. Meanwhile the industry's newly minted lobby group published a briefing pleading with whoever ends up in charge not to reach for rent controls, and Molior published their quarterly London development report, which is the most honest document you will read this year about what happens when the state spends a decade re-engineering who is allowed to buy new homes. The through-line, per Polanyi at the top: everyone in this week's Deep Dive believes the state shapes the housing market. The argument is only ever about how, and for whom.
Dive 1: Rachel Reeves's Mansion House 2026 speech (HM Treasury, 14 July)
Her third Mansion House address, and barring something very strange indeed, her last. The full transcript is on gov.uk and is worth your fifteen minutes, if only as a time capsule.
Theme 1: The record, as she tells it
The Summary: Reeves used the speech to mount a defence of her two years at the Treasury. Her claimed scorecard: at the start of this year Britain had the fastest economic growth in the G7; borrowing fell from 5.2% to 4.2% of GDP last year, the lowest in six years; investment, productivity and wages all rising; NHS waiting lists falling at the fastest rate in seventeen years; half a million children to be lifted out of poverty over the Parliament. She characterised her inheritance as a triple challenge - public finances (over £100bn a year in debt interest), public services, and anaemic growth - and her response as fiscal repair in the first Budget, changed fiscal rules unlocking an additional £120bn of investment at the Spending Review, and cost-of-living measures at the second Budget, including doubled fiscal buffers. She acknowledged the resumption of hostilities in the Middle East as evidence that economic resilience "will continue to be tested". The framing device for the whole speech was her doctrine that radical change is only possible when combined with credibility, which she stated, in various formulations, no fewer than five times.
The Propenomix Perspective: Valedictory speeches are audition tapes for the history books (if not some further padding of the CV, although we know that one has already had a lot of effort and airtime), and this one should be read that way - every number is selected, and the selection is the message. The G7 growth claim is technically accurate for the quarter cited and rather less impressive across the full two years; the borrowing improvement is real and genuinely creditable; the "wages up" line lands differently if you spent 2025 employing people through the National Insurance rise, as plenty of my readers did. What struck me most was what wasn't there. No mention of the unemployment rate at 4.9% and climbing. No mention of payrolls shrinking through the spring (even when padded by an expanding public sector - the private sector has been running away FAST). One glancing reference to inflation, in a speech delivered eight days before a CPI print that may well start with a 3. Can we blame her for the selective framing? Not really - it is a farewell speech, not an audit, and every Chancellor in history has done the same. But the gap between the Mansion House economy and the economy in Chris Watkin's numbers, or the ONS labour data, is the gap the next government inherits. I'd note, too, that the credibility-plus-radicalism doctrine is quietly self-serving: it frames every criticism from the left as insufficient credibility and every criticism from the right as insufficient radicalism. Neat trick. Whether history buys it, we'll see. I know where I am on it.
Theme 2: Securonomics gets its farewell tour
The Summary: Reeves restated her governing framework - securonomics, described as an investment-led growth model in which "an active and strategic state steps up to make conscious and deliberate choices". The speech catalogued its applications: the rescue of British Steel to prevent capacity being lost; backing the defence sector so rising global defence spending lands in Britain; reformed procurement rules to favour British suppliers in steel, shipbuilding and now AI; a Sovereign AI unit, an advanced market commitment on quantum, an AI hardware plan and a new AI Economics Institute; and the claim that economic security is national security. On regional policy, she cited Green Book reform, integrated settlements for mayors, City Investment Funds, an overnight visitor levy power, and - the significant forward commitment, restated from her Mais lecture - giving regional leaders control over a share of national taxes, including income tax and business rates.
The Propenomix Perspective: Here is the part of the speech that survives her. Whoever holds the Treasury from Monday, the intellectual settlement - the state as active participant rather than referee - is now shared ground between the outgoing Chancellor, the incoming Prime Minister and, as we'll get to, the incoming Chancellor. The interesting question for our sector is which version of the active state shows up. The Reeves version was, for all the rhetoric, quite disciplined: interventions were sector-specific, fiscal rules were treated as sacred, and the bond market was courted assiduously. The regional tax devolution line is the one I'd watch - I've been saying for years that Britain hoards fiscal power in the Treasury to a degree no comparable economy tolerates, and handing mayors a share of income tax and business rates would be the single biggest structural change to how growth gets funded in my lifetime. It would also, incidentally, hand the new Prime Minister's old job in Manchester rather a lot of muscle - a detail I'm sure is entirely coincidental. Whether it survives contact with the Treasury orthodoxy that has strangled every previous devolution attempt is another matter. Lord Glasman, of whom more shortly, wants the Treasury abolished outright; Reeves wanted it reformed from within; the institution has outlasted better-armed opponents than either. I'm not convinced this time is different, but for the first time in a while I wouldn't put the probability at zero.
Theme 3: The City measures - capital, credit and a Digital Sovereign Bond
The Summary: The concrete announcements clustered around financial services. The Financial Policy Committee's review of bank capital requirements, which Reeves commissioned, was published the week before and is estimated to enable up to £150bn of additional lending; Nationwide alone has committed an additional £40bn in mortgages and SME lending as a result. Ringfencing reform proposals are in train. The Growth Guarantee Scheme is being more than doubled to £3.5bn of supported SME lending a year, with the number of supported businesses rising from 8,000 to 20,000; Lloyds, NatWest and Allica have each committed £1bn of SME lending over three years against the changes. Pension funds invested an additional £10bn in private markets last year; insurers have deployed £17bn of a £100bn investment pledge. On innovation: a claimed world-leading stablecoin regime, tokenised deposit pilots, agentic AI payments launching first in the UK via Mastercard, and confirmation that the UK is set to become the first G7 country to issue a Digital Sovereign Bond by early next year.
The Propenomix Perspective: Strip out the fintech garnish and the headline for us is the capital release. £150bn of additional lending capacity is a serious number - roughly a year's worth of gross mortgage lending in a normal market - and the direction of travel on bank capital has quietly reversed from the post-2008 ratchet. Whether it lands as mortgages, SME credit or share buybacks is the £64k question, and I'd hedge hard on the split; banks lend into demand, and demand at current rates is the constraint, not capital. The Nationwide £40bn commitment is the one with the clearest read-through to our market, and worth watching in their lending data rather than their press releases. The Digital Sovereign Bond I file under interesting-but-not-yet-material: the significance is less the instrument than the signal that the Debt Management Office is having to innovate to keep a near £3-trillion gilt stock attractive to buyers. When the seller starts offering new packaging, ask yourself about the underlying demand. Perhaps that's too cynical - there are genuine settlement-efficiency arguments - but I've noticed that financial innovation from governments tends to arrive when the old product is getting harder to shift. Financial engineering means massive progress but at the cost of risk that’s historically been difficult to price, or even deliberately mispriced by some unscrupulous operators. Just watch “the Big Short” (or re-watch, if you are as big a fan of the movie as I am).
Theme 4: The European turn
The Summary: Reeves devoted the closing movement of the speech to the EU relationship, stating she has "always been clear about the damage that Brexit did to our economy" and calling for a move towards a trusted economic and security partnership in which the default is UK inclusion. Progress cited: Horizon participation, rejoining Erasmus from next year, and agreement on UK participation in the EU's €90bn loan to Ukraine, announced the previous day. She called for the next UK-EU summit to be rescheduled as soon as possible to finalise agreements on agrifoods, emissions trading, electricity and a Youth Experience Scheme, and framed the prize as reduced business burdens, lower consumer costs, and a more resilient economy.
The Propenomix Perspective: The most politically striking passage of the speech, delivered with the freedom of someone who no longer has to win a by-election in a Leave seat. For the property world the direct effects are second-order - construction labour supply and materials costs move on the margins with EU alignment, and any Youth Experience Scheme would add demand at the sharp end of the rental market in the big cities. The first-order effect is fiscal: closer EU integration is one of the few growth levers available that costs the Exchequer approximately nothing up front, which is why a Chancellor obsessed with credibility spent her farewell advocating it. Here's the tension, though, and it connects straight back to Trumpwatch: Washington is currently writing letters about our media policy and funding pressure groups on our soil, and the deeper the EU embrace, the pricklier that relationship gets. Burnham inherits a foreign economic policy that wants to hug Brussels and not annoy Washington simultaneously. It's hard to say how long you can do both. My guess - and it is only that - is that the EU track advances quietly and technically while the US track gets the theatre, and everyone hopes nobody in the White House reads the technical annexes.
Dive 2: The Chancellor-in-waiting - Shabana Mahmood, Blue Labour, and the new political economy
Not a single paper this one, but a cluster: the week's reporting on the Number 11 succession, read alongside the Blue Labour political-economy literature that suddenly matters rather a lot.
Theme 1: The appointment that calmed the gilt market
The Summary: Multiple outlets reported, on the basis of people briefed on Burnham's thinking, that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is set to be appointed Chancellor once Burnham becomes Prime Minister on Monday, with one source describing the appointment as "nailed down" to the FT. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, an early favourite in the betting, has clearly been passed over (he was odds on last weekend, chances reaching 60%+ according to the markets). Burnham's spokesperson declined to confirm, saying cabinet roles will be assigned only after he formally takes office. Market reaction was measurable: gilt yields edged lower on the reports and sterling touched a one-year high against the euro, with strategists noting that the market had feared a more fiscally expansionary appointment and that Mahmood, like Yvette Cooper, is viewed as pragmatic and disciplined and not expected to tear up the fiscal rules. Wealth Club's Susannah Streeter observed that the chancellor's identity may matter more to markets than the Prime Minister's, given the transmission from gilt yields to swap rates to fixed mortgage pricing.
The Propenomix Perspective: Read that last line from Streeter again, because it is the entire Propenomix thesis in one sentence, delivered by a credible City strategist to a general audience: the Chancellor sets the gilt tone, the gilt tone sets the swaps, the swaps set your mortgage. The bond market has effectively pre-approved this appointment, and that pre-approval is worth real basis points to every borrower reading this. Worth pausing on how strange the mechanism is, though. Mahmood has never held a Treasury cabinet post - her economic record is a shadow Treasury stint over a decade ago - and the market's comfort rests almost entirely on temperament and signal: she is not Miliband, she is briefed as disciplined, and Burnham has committed to the existing fiscal rules. That is a confidence built on positioning rather than track record, and confidence of that kind is cheap to acquire and expensive to lose - ask Kwasi Kwarteng. The first real test is not Monday's appointment but the autumn Budget, where the arithmetic Reeves left behind (a spending review already committed, revenue undershooting, and a market pricing the next rate move up) has to be made to add up by someone making their fiscal debut on the biggest stage there is. I want her to succeed, for entirely selfish reasons priced in basis points. I am hedging my optimism until I see the red book of course.
Theme 2: What Blue Labour actually is
The Summary: Mahmood is publicly associated with Blue Labour, the tendency founded by Maurice (now Lord) Glasman at Conway Hall in April 2009 and described by him as "a deeply conservative socialism" placing family, faith and work at the centre of a politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. Intellectually the movement draws on Karl Polanyi's account of markets as social constructions requiring embedding in society, and positions the state as the primary tool for constraining global capital, while leaning right on social and cultural questions including immigration. It was an early advocate of industrial policy and calls for support of industries of critical national importance and regional policy to spread the benefits. Glasman has argued for parliamentary sovereignty as the central institution of a politics that "lays down the law to the market", and has recently called for the Treasury to be abolished. Burnham has perhaps recast himself as a Blue Labour figure during his return to Parliament (although I’m not sure Glasman has the memo yet as the unofficial/offical movement spokesperson - he described Mahmood as the de facto leader, which would be a strange dynamic between 10 and 11 here) - interventionist on economics, tougher on borders and culture - and his stated programme includes "good growth in every postcode", accelerated devolution and an increased stock of social housing, delivered within the existing fiscal rules and the 2024 manifesto's tax pledges.
The Propenomix Perspective: Most of the country will meet Blue Labour for the first time this week via profiles of the new Chancellor, and the honest summary is that nobody - possibly including its adherents - knows exactly what it means at Treasury scale, because it has never been tried there. The philosophy is coherent enough: markets are made by states, so make them deliberately, in the interests of work, family and place. As it happens, I have some sympathy with parts of it - regular readers know my line that combat rather than collaboration between the state and the private rented sector is ideological idiocy, and a politics actually built on reciprocity would be an upgrade on the last decade of landlord-bashing from one side and state-bashing from the other. The risk sits in the gap between the poetry and the spreadsheet. "Laying down the law to the market" is a fine slogan until the market in question is the one that buys your gilts, at which point the law-laying gets negotiated rather quickly - see Theme 1, where the mere rumour of discipline was worth a rally. My honest read is that Blue Labour in office will be less about new interventions than about the framing of interventions Labour was doing anyway: steel, procurement, social housing, devolution, all now wearing Polanyi rather than PowerPoint. But I've been wrong about the durability of political projects before - I did not have Burnham-as-PM on my 2026 card twelve months ago - so let's file this under "watch the appointments, not the essays". In summary - I think this SOUNDS wonderful, but then so does socialism in general - you’ve got to be very, very, very clever and also remember that - as Charlie said - Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome will trump everything.
Theme 3: What an interventionist Treasury means for property
The Summary: The Burnham programme's property-relevant commitments centre on social housing expansion, devolution of power and funding to regional leaders, and growth distributed geographically, all within inherited fiscal constraints. Blue Labour's broader literature endorses redistributing ownership and control towards workers and communities and constraining what it terms the commodification of housing. Specific instruments remain unannounced pending the new government's first fiscal events; areas flagged by commentators as live possibilities under a more interventionist Treasury include rent regulation (examined in Dive 3), expanded compulsory purchase and land value capture, direct state development, and social housing acquisition programmes. The market constraint documented in Theme 1 - gilt investors' conditional confidence - applies to all of them.
The Propenomix Perspective: Here is where I put my own cards on the table, because for once the Overton window may be drifting towards positions I have argued in these pages for years. If the new government is serious about a bigger social sector, the intelligent version is not fighting the existing private rented sector into the sea - it is removing the need for it over time by building and buying a genuinely great social stock. I have recently argued for a voluntary state buyback scheme somewhere around 85 to 90p in the pound: landlords who want out get a clean, chain-free exit; the state builds a balance sheet of net assets rather than another subsidy line; tenants get security without a possession crisis. A Polanyi-reading Chancellor ought to find that congenial - it is the state making a market, deliberately, to a social end, and both sides trade willingly. Will they do it? I suspect not in year one; the Treasury will say there's no headroom, and the Treasury will be half right. But watch the language around social housing acquisitions and around land - a government that starts talking about buying existing stock and capturing land value is a different animal from one that just sets targets for other people to miss. And on land value tax, which the wonkier end of this new tendency flirts with: I remain more sympathetic than most in my industry, provided it replaces rather than tops up the current mess of property taxes. Hedged, as ever - the gap between what interventionists write in opposition and do at the despatch box is one of the more reliable constants in British life.
Dive 3: RE:UK Briefing - "Rent Controls Risk Worsening the Housing Crisis" (16 July)
The industry body RE:UK (the rebranded champion for UK real estate) published this briefing on Wednesday, and the timing is not subtle: two working days before a new government arrives whose Prime Minister has, in his Manchester years, been notably warm on rent regulation. Consider it the industry's opening letter to the new Chancellor.
Theme 1: The Scottish experiment, as Exhibit A
The Summary: The briefing's core empirical case is Scotland's emergency rent controls, introduced in September 2022 as a 0% freeze and subsequently a 3% cap on in-tenancy increases. RE:UK reports that landlords priced future uncertainty into new lets, with advertised rents for new lets rising 15% in Edinburgh and 14% in Glasgow, against 4.1% in England over the comparable period. On investment, the briefing states around £700m of Build to Rent investment was paused or withdrawn within months, with the British Property Federation identifying £2.5bn of BTR investment at risk of leaving Scotland entirely. The briefing's headline framing figures for the wider sector: 4.7 million PRS households, 52% growth in the PRS since 2008, 19% of landlords considering exiting, and 60% saying they would exit if rent controls were introduced.
The Propenomix Perspective: The Scottish numbers are the strongest card in the deck and RE:UK plays it correctly. I watched the Scottish episode in real time and the mechanism was exactly as described: cap the in-tenancy increase, and landlords load the entire expected future into the one price point they still control, the new-let rent - so the people the policy was designed to protect (sitting tenants) were protected briefly, while every mover, every new household, every student paid double-digit increases as the entry fee. When the cap at 0% came to an end, rents were allowed to go up by up to 6% for sitting tenants, a figure that hadn’t been seen in Scotland for many years. That said, let me be careful to argue both sides properly, because this briefing is advocacy and should be read as such. The 60% would-exit figure is a survey of intentions, and stated exit intentions run famously hotter than actual behaviour - we have years of "landlords will all leave" surveys against transaction data showing gradual attrition, not exodus. I’ve long bemoaned surveys of intention - let’s look at action. One more big question is were Scotland's controls actually emergency measures - they were badly designed even by the standards of rent-control advocates; a Burnham government citing European reference-rent systems would argue the comparison is unfair. My position, held for years and unchanged: rent controls are bad economics with excellent polling, which makes them permanently dangerous, and the honest counter is not to shout "Venezuela" but to make the supply case relentlessly - which brings us to the next theme.
Theme 2: Investment, quality, and the quiet cost of caps
The Summary: The briefing argues rent controls chill precisely the institutional investment local authorities need, since pension funds and other long-term investors require predictable income to meet liabilities, and unpredictable intervention in rental income makes housing uninvestable relative to alternatives. It cites Build to Rent construction starts falling from 3,065 (2024) to 613 (2025) in London, down 80% year on year, and from 12,781 to 8,063 in the regions, down 37%. On stock quality, it points to the social housing precedent: the 1% annual rent reduction imposed from 2016 was followed by a 7.3% fall in spending on major repairs, its illustration of how constrained income degrades maintenance. It notes the pressure will intensify as all rental properties must reach EPC C by 2030, with around half currently below that standard, arguing constrained landlords are more likely to exit than reinvest.
The Propenomix Perspective: The repairs statistic is the one I'd put in front of any politician tempted by caps, because it converts the abstract into the lived: when you cap the income and the costs keep rising, the adjustment doesn't come out of profit first, it comes out of the roof, the boiler and the damp-proofing - and five years later a committee holds hearings into why the housing stock deteriorated, having voted for the mechanism that did it. Awaab's Law phase two, announced this very week with its 24-hour hazard deadlines from November, makes the point in reverse: the state is simultaneously raising the mandatory quality floor and (if the interventionist wing gets its way on rents) considering capping the income that funds compliance. You can have rising standards or falling income, but both at once is how you get disinvestment with a moral glow around it. The EPC C interaction is the sleeper here - half the stock below C, a 2030 deadline, and works that routinely run five figures per property. I'd hedge the BTR starts numbers only in one respect: 2025 starts were suppressed everywhere by Building Safety Regulator delays, not just by political risk, so the 80% London collapse has more than one father. But the direction is not in dispute, and Molior, coming next, shows just how load-bearing BTR has become for what little gets built at all.
Theme 3: Finland, and the only answer that actually works
The Summary: As its constructive alternative, the briefing cites Finland: anticipating population growth in Helsinki, policymakers maintained a strong housing pipeline, keeping supply ahead of demand. Vacancy rates in the Helsinki region reached around 8-10% in recent years, producing genuine competition between landlords; rents have grown at roughly 1% annually - below inflation, meaning falling real rents - and landlords increasingly offer discounts and incentives to attract tenants. The briefing's asks of government: no new up-front costs or developer contributions, tax and regulatory stability, faster planning, support for construction innovation, removal of council tax and business rates on empty units in new developments, and reintroduced SDLT support for high-density housing with a carve-out for low-value sites.
The Propenomix Perspective: Helsinki is my favourite housing statistic that nobody in Westminster ever mentions: real rents falling, tenants courted with incentives, landlords competing - achieved not by a single control but by the deeply unfashionable method of building more homes than households, on purpose, for years. It is Polanyi's point turned back on the interventionists: Finland planned its way to a functioning free market in rentals. The state made the market; the market then did the redistributive work that caps pretend to do. I'm less starry-eyed about the asks list - it reads, as these lists always do, like the industry's standing wishlist with this week's date on it, and "no new developer contributions" is a harder sell politically than the briefing acknowledges when the same government has infrastructure and affordable-housing promises to fund. But the core ask - stability - is the one I'd co-sign without reservation. Having recorded my scepticism about several of this government's housing interventions over the past two years, let me be even-handed: the single most damaging thing in UK property investment is not any individual policy, it is the churn - the sense that the rules of a 25-year asset can change every 18 months. If Blue Labour's communitarian instincts produced nothing more than a decade of boring, predictable housing policy, our sector would take that trade in a heartbeat. Likely outcome? History suggests I shouldn't hold my breath.
Dive 4: Molior - Residential Development in London, July 2026
Molior interviews 600 development sales offices every quarter and has done so since 1997, which makes this the closest thing London has to ground truth. The July edition, covering Q2 2026, is bleak in a way that deserves precise numbers rather than adjectives.
Theme 1: Nobody is buying - and I mean nobody
The Summary: Molior titles a central section "People Are Not Buying New Homes In London". Q2 2026 sales ran slightly above the previous eight quarters' average of 2,575 per quarter - against the average of 22,000 per quarter that would be required to sustain annual delivery of 88,000 homes, making sales rates 13% of required levels. Of the quarter's sales, 1,919 homes went to companies and 873 to people; UK individuals bought just 589 new homes across the whole of London in three months. Excluding corporate deals, active sales outlets recorded 0.3 sales per week (!!). Construction starts, while up 82% on 2025 (a year suppressed by Building Safety Regulator delays), remain at 13% of government targets, with London Square accounting for 25% of all private starts in H1 and Berkeley Group 15%.
The Propenomix Perspective: Five hundred and eighty-nine. Sit with that number. In a city of over nine million people, in a quarter of the year, 589 UK individuals bought a new-build home. When I started in this business, the launch weekend queue was a cliché of London development; the modern equivalent is a sales suite averaging one sale a month. And note what the 13%-of-required figure does to every housing target you have ever read: London's contribution to the 1.5 million homes is not being missed by a margin, it is being missed by an order of magnitude, and no planning reform on earth fixes a market where consented schemes cannot find buyers at viable prices. Two developers starting 40% of everything is its own warning - that is not a market, it is a duopoly with a long tail that’s been created by a hostile environment towards SMEs - whether deliberate or accidental - over the past two decades. Is there a world in which this turns quickly? Only one, as far as I can tell: a material fall in the cost of money. Everything else is garnish.
Theme 2: Build to Rent as Plan B, and the unsold mountain
The Summary: Molior reports 52% of Q2 absorption came from Build to Rent and other block deals: seven investors funded 870 BTR construction starts during the quarter, and nine investors bought 570 homes in block deals - transactions Molior characterises as often "Plan B", not an exit developers would choose. The unsold stock position: 4,629 homes complete but unsold, the highest level Molior has ever recorded; 13,770 homes under construction but unsold; and 2,704 unsold homes halted part-built. Work has stopped at one in five construction projects - 56 developments, gates padlocked, containing 3,913 part-built homes - with rising construction costs cited as the main cause of contractor distress. The proportion of homes under construction that are unsold stands at 49%, against 48% in 2018 - the absolute numbers have collapsed because construction itself has.
The Propenomix Perspective: The record 4,629 finished-and-empty homes is the headline, but the phrase that stopped me was "Plan B". Half of everything that moved in London last quarter moved because an institution took a block off a developer's hands at a price the developer would rather not discuss - the discount is the deal, even though it stays politely unquoted. Which rather vindicates a mechanism I have proposed in these pages for the state: if institutions can build portfolios buying blocks at meaningful discounts from motivated developers, a government wanting social housing at pace could do precisely the same - my 85-90p-in-the-pound logic, applied to brand-new stock sitting finished and dark in zone 3. The stock would cost less than building it, arrive immediately, and relieve the very developers whose distress is currently padlocking sites. Fifty-six padlocked developments, by the way, is the statistic I'd pin to the Treasury noticeboard: nearly four thousand homes, part-built, weathering. Every month they sit there, remediation costs compound and the eventual delivery price rises. It's hard to say which is worse value for the nation - homes never started, or homes half-built and abandoned - but only one of them rusts in public view. Phew. Onwards, to the punchline.
Theme 3: The 2028 cliff edge
The Summary: Molior's forward pipeline analysis: 70% of current construction completes during 2026 and 2027 - some 20,700 homes - leaving just 8,750 homes forecast to be on site in January 2028, plus whatever starts in the interim. 235 of 285 active development sites will complete their current phases by end-2027. 140 of London's 166 active developers are building only those completing projects, and would effectively exit London development if they do not commence new schemes. Molior's stated conclusion on causation: only higher sales rates will give developers the confidence to build more.
The Propenomix Perspective: Under nine thousand homes on site in the whole of Greater London, eighteen months from now, on current trajectory. For calibration, London's assessed need runs to 88,000 a year as discussed, and even the bad years of the last decade managed multiples of that pipeline. What Molior is describing is not a downturn - downturns are cyclical and this has a structural signature - it is the potential demobilisation of an industry: 140 firms whose London existence ends passively, by simply not starting the next job. Industries demobilise much faster than they remobilise; the skills disperse, the subcontractor networks dissolve, and when demand returns you discover the capacity has not waited for you - the NAO's report on construction skills this same week, fretting about finding 60,000 additional workers, will look quaint if the capital sheds its delivery base first. I'd love to tell you I see the catalyst that averts this. In honesty, I see three candidates - rates falling meaningfully, the state buying stock at scale, or a genuine mass-market product shift - and I'd only put confident money on the first eventually arriving, on a timetable nobody controls. The new government has perhaps a year to decide whether London's development industry is critical national infrastructure or just another market having a moment. Blue Labour doctrine says the former. The Budget will say what they actually believe. Where I am Blue here is that I do believe that housing is critical national infrastructure - although I’d be totally focused on social housing and let the market do what it is supposed to do when it comes to private housebuilding.
Theme 4: The buy-to-let confession
The Summary: Molior's closing analysis addresses the disappearance of buy-to-let investors from new-build sales. A decade ago, BTL investors purchased new homes at the start of construction, providing the pre-sales developers needed to secure development finance and thereby causing construction starts. Molior states that dynamic "has disappeared", attributing it to "deliberate policies of successive Governments". Instead, many investors are now selling properties acquired 5 to 15 years ago, often at prices 20%+ below comparable new-build homes; in Canary Wharf alone, around 1,000 second-hand new-build-style apartments are for sale, with this excess competition suppressing prices and discouraging new development. Molior notes this is not solely a London phenomenon but is occurring in all major UK urban apartment markets, and concludes that while demand-side problems exist, the impact of supply-side reforms will consequently be muted.
The Propenomix Perspective: There it is, in a sober research document rather than a landlord newsletter: the pre-sale investor was the ignition system of urban development finance, successive governments removed it deliberately - the 3% surcharge, Section 24, the regulatory ratchet - and the engine now will not start. I have made this argument so many times over the years that I hesitate to make it again, so let Molior's independence carry it instead. Two further observations. First, the 20% discount on 5-to-15-year-old stock against comparable new-build is, for the professional investor still in the game, close to a published arbitrage - buying below replacement cost has been my strategic anchor since I started taking property seriously, and here is a research house documenting it at district scale in the most liquid city in the country. A thousand units in Canary Wharf alone. I'm not saying it's easy money - service charges, cladding legacies and lease terms all need forensic work, which is rather the point of doing real due diligence - but the raw pricing is the kind you go years without seeing. Second, and less cheerfully for the new administration: Molior's final line, that supply-side reforms will be muted while the demand side stays broken, is a direct challenge to every politician who thinks planning reform alone builds homes. The state spent a decade re-engineering who may profitably buy new flats, and the result is 589 individual buyers a quarter and an industry packing up. If that isn't Polanyi's planned market, I don't know what is. The question for Monday's new tenants of Downing Street is whether they can bring themselves to admit which interventions caused it - and I'd gently note that admitting it and reversing some of it would cost less than most of the alternatives on their whiteboard.
As we get towards the end for this week - I can't wait for our next workshop in Manchester in October. Joint Ventures and M&A with Rod Turner and myself: how to partner without ending up in litigation, how to buy portfolios and companies rather than single units, and - given everything Molior just told us about consolidation - how to be on the right side of the shakeout that is visibly underway from the biggest developers down to the two-property partnership. The room is always half the value; the people booking early for this one are exactly who you'd want to sit next to. We’ve got an incredible venue and secured a superb sponsor for this one too - but all is under wraps at this stage. Book your tickets at: tinyurl.com/pbwoct26 to get your 20%+ Super Early Bird discount - and book a VIP dinner ticket if you want to grab some time with myself and Rod; at dinner, everyone gets a slot to discuss anything they want, we focus on what might be holding you back at the moment in your property business, but you can go as off piste as you want to!
Above all - please remember to Keep Calm, ALWAYS listen to or read the Supplement, and Carry On. A new Prime Minister tomorrow, a new Chancellor by teatime, a new ideology in the building - and yet the fundamentals we track every week have not moved an inch: too few of the right homes in the right places, a rental market short of stock, yields at 7%-plus against borrowing in the 4s (although the new debt is 6% for us at the moment), and a million-listing sales market that rewards the prepared buyer and punishes the hopeful one. Governments change the weather; they change the climate far more slowly than their speeches suggest. Position for the climate, respect the weather, and remember that investing in property is not a guaranteed win - it is a discipline, and disciplines compound. There will be opportunities abound between here and 2030, and I'd rather we found them calm than breathless. KCCO!