Invest & Fund Blog

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Budget day is always chaotic: the rolling commentary, the instant verdicts, the scramble to work out who won and who lost, and now, a few days on, with the Red Book read properly, and the OBR's numbers digested, it is easier to see what John Healey's

Mainstream Manchesterism

For a decade, Greater Manchester has been the test case for what happens when a city region can direct its own housing money. On Wednesday, a Prime Minister who used to run it and a Chancellor who promised to move money "into every postcode around Britain" will try

Development Scares

As Halloween approaches, plenty of people will be watching horror films with the lights off, and anyone who has managed a development finance case knows the real scares aren't on Netflix. They are hiding in appendix seven of the appraisal, in the ecology report nobody has commissioned yet,

Spooky

On Wednesday 28 October, John Healey will deliver his first Budget as Chancellor, bringing in the first fiscal event of Andy Burnham's premiership. Expect the usual fog beforehand, briefings, kite-flying and think-tank wish lists. Most of it will be noise, but what do we really expect to happen?

Maps

Ask an SME developer why a promising site slipped away (as we often do in passing conversations), and you will often hear the same answer: someone else had already tied it up. Not bought it. Tied it up. England's land market runs on two layers: the first is

School

Every September the property market has its frantic ‘back-to-school’ moment, and this year the headline writers had their story ready. Asking prices up, plus housebuilding starts up, chuck in Interest rates on hold. Must mean a recovery, surely? Look a little closer and a different picture emerges, one that matters

Lacked Ambition

If you ask most people in finance what A.I. will do for their sector, you will typically hear the same three answers: faster response times to win business, automated underwriting elements to process business faster, and stronger, faster summarisation of data to intensify decision-making. However, as we all know,

Structural Change

For years, the story everyone tells of non-bank lending in UK property development finance has begun and ended as a tale about rate-cycle side effects. Base rates spiked, high-street banks got nervous, specialist lenders filled the gap, and the story goes that once rates come back down, the banks will

Disagree

This week's house price data gave us the familiar spectacle of two "official" indices disagreeing, competing over which version of reality to paint. Lloyds, still reporting under their Halifax name, showed UK house prices falling 0.4% year-on-year in August, the first annual drop since November

Critical Data

Last week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski called for a moratorium on new data centre approvals in England, arguing that the sector's water and electricity demands are being waved through under a "critical infrastructure" designation while millions of households sit under drought restrictions. The government'

Looking Back

For almost four years, this blog has been used every week to make a call on something: where rates were heading, whether a piece of planning reform would actually deliver homes, whether a headline in the Telegraph or the Guardian was telling the real story or perhaps a convenient one!

Shortfall

Buried in the background notes of this week's UK House Price Index for June 2026 is a line that says more about the state of the new-build market than any of the headline figures above it. HM Land Registry has stopped publishing average price and percentage change for

Style Council - Part Two

Last week's blog set out what is on the table: a petition through the 100,000 threshold, a Prime Minister declining to rule out a proportional property tax, a land value tax or a lower mansion tax threshold, and a decision realistically deferred to the autumn Budget. This

Style Council - Part 1

In this week's blog, in part one of two, we look more closely at a petition to scrap council tax and stamp duty and replace both with a single annual property tax that has passed 100,000 signatures, which means Parliament has to debate it. The proposal behind

Passing Storm

RICS's latest Residential Market Survey, covering June 2026, carries a notably more upbeat tone than anything the industry has published in months, which, in fairness, wasn’t too difficult given the trajectory much of the commentary has been on. The institution's Head of Market Research and

The Long Hot Summer

If you wanted to design a laboratory experiment to test what happens to the UK housing market when the entire country stops paying attention, you could hardly improve on the summer of 2026. Six weeks of record temperatures, and when I say record temperatures, we are now almost in “post

Contingency

There was a time, not so many moons ago, and not fondly remembered by anyone who underwrote through it, when contingency was arguably the soft part of a development appraisal. The number everyone knew would be squeezed. Build costs were hardened, professional fees were benchmarked, but contingency sat there as

Fast Arithmetic

The numbers always catch up with the ambition in the end, and as bold as the government's commitment to deliver 1.5 million new homes in England over this Parliament was, the arithmetic is starting to bite. The latest estimates suggest that around 342,100 homes were delivered

Space

There is an intentionally engineered and somewhat comforting story attached to the index tracker. Chapter one: buy one fund, the story goes, and you own the whole market- hundreds or thousands of companies, spread across sectors and continents, with risk diluted to a level that lets you stop worrying and

Next?

With Sir Keir Starmer announcing his intention to step down and a leadership transition expected to conclude in the autumn, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, now an MP after his Makerfield by-election win, has emerged as the clear frontrunner to become the country's next Prime Minister. A Burnham

De-escalation Dividend

At the time of writing, global mediators have announced a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, set to be signed on 19th June and intended to bring the conflict to a formal close within sixty days. A fourteen-point draft reportedly puts the lifting of oil sanctions and

Grey Belt Revisited

Several years ago now, in an impassioned blog piece (that we sadly can’t even blame on an A.I. hallucination as it pre-dated the technology), we theorised that the key to unlocking some of the housing situation would be a leap into the Grey, a revitalisation of Britain'

The Contractor Question

In this week's blog, we take a closer look at one of the single most operationally significant third parties in any residential development loan: your client gets the headlines, the site gets the scrutiny, but what about any contractors involved? Often treated as a footnote in the early

Eleven-Year Track Record

There is a particular kind of headline that sounds more alarming than it is. "Worst quarter ever recorded." "Investors lose money for the first time." Take those phrases out of context, and you have a compelling case for panic. Put them back in context, and you

The Future Has Not Been Written

One article that caught our eye recently was a punchy piece in The Telegraph weighing in on artificial intelligence, with the kind of headline that sends a chill through anyone in the housing industry: AI job losses, it warned, could break the housing market, and begin the long-deferred equity apocalypse.