Starting off

I may be wrong but I haven’t found a good commercial real estate blog.  Soooo…I decided to start one myself.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to do 2-3 posts per week that draw attention to some interesting analysis from elsewhere and provide initial thoughts on issues related to commercial real estate.

I’m hoping to provide a forum that provides some food for thought for anyone interested in the operation of real estate markets.  I’m pretty much a generalist with a reasonable knowledge of appraisal, investment, development and asset management.  I think there are lots of fascinating issues that are interesting to real estate professionals and students alike.  I hope that you’ll contribute and add value to my first thoughts.

For instance, last night’s Newsnight had a long piece on retirement housing.  Following a research report from L&G  focussing on “last time buyers” (their phrase not mine), it examined the mismatch between supply and demand for retirement housing.  Previous research by my collaborator Anupam Nanda (with Prof Michael Ball) was mentioned on it.  The hoary old chestnut of the planning system as the barrier to supply came up a few times.  It always seems strange to me how “the planning system” seems to be presumed to be some type of accidental affliction that we somehow ended up with instead of the result of many messy compromises trying to reconcile the inevitable conflict between our contradictory desires to increase new house building without actually building any new houses.  So, instead we blame “the planning system” ?    A bit like England’s (chosen carefully) desire for US tax levels and a Scandinavian welfare system?  Getting off the subject of real estate here…