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!
Somewhere north of 200 blogs now sit in our archive, which is either a badge of honour or a very long charge sheet, depending on how the last few years have actually played out. In the spirit of the "honest health update" approach we've tried to take with the market itself, it felt like time to turn that same scrutiny on ourselves. So this week, no news hook, no ONS release, no Budget to dissect, just a look back through our own back catalogue to work out what we got right, what we got wrong, and perhaps more usefully for anyone reading this as a lender, developer or intermediary, what that says about how to treat market punditry, including our own, going forward!
What we got right
The structural case for private credit. Back in January 2024, in a piece called "Groupthink," we ran with the consensus view that we'd passed peak pain in the housing market and that fresh capital was about to rotate back into real estate and its correlated markets. At the time, the wider case we'd been building for over a year was that P2P lending backed by real estate wasn't a niche curiosity but an emerging and legitimate corner of the private credit universe, one that had "more than earned its inclusion" alongside the trillion-dollar institutional players it sat next to. That argument has aged really well. By the time we published "Institution" in August 2025, we were writing about a sector that had gone from "a quirky experiment to a regulated sector commanding a book value of multiple billions." Our own numbers tell the same story: £200 million of capital and interest returned to lenders when "Groupthink" was published in January 2024 had grown to £389 million by the time "Grey Belt Revisited" ran in June 2026, with zero losses throughout. The direction of travel we called “institutional money taking alternative property credit seriously” is no longer a prediction. It's a balance sheet.
In March 2026's "You Spin Me Round," we revisited a more alarmist piece from the previous year that had argued the case for building now or regretting it later on rental supply. With the benefit of hindsight, that earlier warning held up better than it might have looked at the time. When February 2026's ONS data showed rent growth slowing to 3.5%, the easy read was that the crisis was cooling. We argued the opposite: that a slowdown in the rate of increase from an already-record base of £1,367 a month was not relief; it was a ceiling, evidence that tenants had run out of financial road rather than evidence that supply had caught up with demand. The subsequent data on renter mobility (56% of tenants stuck in place despite wanting to move) and household formation (a third of men aged 20-34 still living with parents) supported the thesis that the pressure was building up rather than dissipating. This is a case where sticking with an "alarmist" call, even as the headline data seemed to soften, was the right instinct.
One solid call was that rates would find a ceiling before the market believed it. Through the back half of 2023 in "Volcker Shock" we argued that the Bank of England was much nearer the top of the hiking cycle than the prevailing mood in the press suggested, at a time when talk of runaway inflation and further hikes was still common currency. We went against the grain with that call, and we were broadly vindicated: rates did plateau, and the "soft landing" language we used in early 2024 became the mainstream narrative within months, rather than the contrarian one it felt like at the time it was written. One thing we have prevailed in perhaps is being sceptical of the media's favourite crisis of the moment in "Data v Opinions" in October 2024 we argued that swap rate panic being reported in the press didn't match what the actual data (crude oil pricing, mortgage approval volumes, the SONIA curve) was telling us, and that lenders pulling deals ahead of an inflation announcement was commercial positioning, not a reliable signal of where rates were really going. The mortgage approval data did keep climbing through that period, vindicating the "watch the data, not the narrative" instinct that has been something of a house style in these pieces ever since.
What we got wrong
Ok, so we aren’t perfect. Grey belt. This is the one that stings a little more than the others, because we got there early, and early is sometimes as good as wrong. Well before Sir Keir Starmer stood up in April 2024 and described "poor-quality scrubland" ripe for release, we'd already floated the idea in our own pages that unlocking Britain's tired industrial fringe was a genuine route through the housing crisis. "Grey Belt Revisited" in June 2026 gave us the chance to mark that homework, and the honest verdict was "half right." We were right that the concept had merit and right that it would become government policy. We were wrong about who would benefit and wrong about the scale. The Campaign to Protect Rural England found that 88% of the first wave of grey belt approvals were on undeveloped countryside, not the disused petrol stations and car parks originally promised. Knight Frank's honest assessment put total delivery at roughly 100,000 homes across the entire parliament, 20,000 a year, against a shortfall running into the hundreds of thousands. And rather than levelling the playing field for the SME developers we back, the data from 224 planning appeals analysed by Marrons showed schemes of 200-plus units achieving 100% approval rates, while the smallest schemes (2–9 units, the bread and butter of many of our clients) were approved just 30% of the time. We called the direction; we badly underestimated the friction, and we missed entirely that the policy's own affordable housing "Golden Rules" would end up squeezing the smaller developers hardest.
In February 2025's "Healthy Markets," we admitted upfront that we'd anticipated the rise of institutional build-to-rent, "although admittedly not to the degree currently reported." A think tank report at the time put institutional ownership of new UK builds above 20%, considerably further and faster than we'd modelled when we first warned about the model's affordability limitations. We were right on the underlying critique, which means this sits on the border of right and wrong calls: the fact that BTR doesn't solve affordability for the households who need it most, and that a more decentralised, SME-led model of delivery is healthier for the market, but we underestimated how quickly capital would move into a model we ourselves had been sceptical of. It's a reminder that pointing out a flaw in a trend doesn't mean the trend won't happen anyway, often faster than the critics expect.
What we underestimated on the downside
One thing we didn’t grasp years ago was the scale of the housing shortfall itself, but then perhaps nobody did. It's worth being honest that even our own concern pieces have, at times, been too optimistic about the pace of delivery against the government's 1.5 million homes target. "Fast Arithmetic" in July 2026 noted that around 342,100 homes had been delivered against a run rate that needed to be considerably higher to hit the five-year goal, while "Grey Belt Revisited" separately flagged housing starts of just 38,000 in a single quarter in mid-2025, "well below the required run rate." Across 2024 and 2025, several pieces expressed cautious optimism that planning reform, grey belt release and the Homes England lending alliance would meaningfully close that gap. In practice, the shortfall has proven stickier than the more upbeat pieces in the archive assumed, and the "Shortfall" blog series has had to keep returning to the same well because the gap has not narrowed as quickly as hoped. This is negative for the country, but it’s positive for our industry given we are a solutions-based sector, and there sure are plenty of problems in the housing sector to run at!
What this tells us
Looking back across several years and 200-plus posts, the pattern is fairly consistent. The structural calls for the growth of private credit as an asset class, the persistence of the affordability crisis, scepticism toward media-driven panic, and the case for building more homes generally have held up well, in some cases better than we gave ourselves credit for at the time. The calls that have needed correcting are almost always about speed and mechanism rather than direction: how fast reform delivers, who captures the benefit of a policy once it's implemented, and how long a "temporary" market dislocation persists before it resolves. For anyone lending against, developing, or investing in UK residential property, that's probably the most useful takeaway of all: the big picture is usually easier to call correctly than the timeline, and it's the timeline that determines whether a loan, a scheme or a portfolio actually survives to see the thesis proven right.
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