The Blog

In December 2017, the Gracechurch Group (which includes Palatium Investment Management, Dominic Lawson Bespoke Planning, Crocus Valley and Bonnar Allan) published a report on the state of brownfield sites in England, following on from the creation of pilot brownfield registers. 67 local planning authorities (‘LPAs’) had produced these pilot registers. As of 31 December 2017,

On the same day that The Gracechurch Group published its review of the potential of brownfield land, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (“CPRE”) published, ‘Unlocking potential – Best Practice for Brownfield Land Registers’. Unlike the Gracechurch brownfield report, the CPRE’s document is not focused on the amount of brownfield land available vs.

The report, Brownfield: The Housing Crisis Solved?, has been published by the Gracechurch group, which includes Palatium Investment Management, Dominic Lawson Bespoke Planning, Crocus Valley and Bonnar Allan. It is a study assessing brownfield sites across England, determining what contribution they could make to solving the housing crisis. Councils are required to create new brownfield

Our planning application for nine houses in Colchester has now been validated and a formal decision will be made next year.  

For those who believe in property cycles, 2015 was the end of the beginning. Since 2009 almost everything has been heading upwards and most investments have been somewhere between productive and extremely lucrative. European Real Estate company shares increased by multiples between 2x and 10x; so did real estate debt securities; so did the equity

The team at Palatium has been greatly saddened to hear of the death of former colleague Caroline Philips.  Caroline was a great colleague and wonderful professional. Banking and bankers have recently become a difficult caricature, but Caroline was the antithesis of that stereotype. She was a woman in a world dominated by men, she was

There is still plenty of bad news around – China devaluing to help stop its economy slowing down, The Greek deal still not done, Russia flexing its muscles and a wave of migrants crossing into Europe. The stock market has taken fright but the property industry can’t chop and change with every piece of news because

The wraps have come off Broadgate 5, the new 700,000 sq ft London HQ of UBS. It’s intended to look like its been machined out of a single block of metal.  maybe, but its huge size and entirely different architecture relative to the rest of Broadgate makes it a difficult building to like.

With German Bunds into negative territory the pressure on institutions to find yield is increasing.  Money is once again flowing into structured credit and that means eventually into real estate.  Although it might seem as if prime yields cannot go any lower the sheer weight of money says otherwise – at least in the short

We attended the Government Property Conference where Francis Maude was the keynote speaker.  He had an impressive list of achievements by the government in relation to selling property and using the government estate more efficiently.  Delegates were asked to be more proactive in identifying sites that were surplus to requirements but the reward for doing