The latest from The Property Chronicle

Mortgages and mismatching
by Duncan Needham
Victorian bankers rarely wrote mortgages. As a contemporary bankers manual explained: ‘house or shop property, even of a superior class, is not a desirable security…on the grounds of its uncertainty of sale’.(1) Until the 1980s, UK clearing bank assets mainly comprised commercial bills of three months maturity or less, short-term advances, and short-dated government securities.

A REIT way to invest
by Brad Thomas
As a committed, passionate, and experienced REIT analyst, part of my steadfast research includes observing principles I can rely on time after time, to deliver alpha and deliver results – and then, share my findings. That’s part of why I present these columns in The Property Chronicle. Today, I want to illuminate a principle of

Too Close for Comfort?
by Gavriel Merkado
I was recently at an event hosted by the Urban Land Institute and Transport for London, and there was a question raised about the impact on property values made by the transportation infrastructure in London. Most of us assumed that there is a price premium people are willing to pay to be nearer to a

Kent: the right track for investors
by Ben Keating
With stamp duty rates crippling the London residential market, many investors have naturally been looking to areas further afield. A lot of articles in the press have focused on regional opportunities as investors seek cheaper areas to expand their portfolios, often enticed by the attractive yields on offer. I have recently read about the positives

If Theresa May truly admired free markets she would embrace Canada+
by Alexander C. R. Hammond
The one thing that stood out in Theresa May’s recent Conservative conference speech was her praise of free markets. In a hall erupting with applause, the Prime Minister noted “free markets are the greatest agent of collective human progress ever devised… We should defend free markets because it is ordinary working people who benefit.” May

Railways – The First Big Business
by David Hodgkins
Railways were big businesses long before the creation of the Big Four after World War I (London, Midland & Scottish, London & North Eastern, Great Western and Southern). Compared with firms in other industries the railway companies were from the start giants in terms of capital employed and numbers of employees. In 1825 there were

Agricultural Commodity Prices: What a difference three months makes!
by Carl Atkin
In June 2018, the London Wheat Futures market was hovering around £150/tonne. Whilst this represented a modest improvement over the position 12 months earlier, there seemed to be little to get excited about in terms of market movement and the outlook for 2018 harvest profitability for farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. The FAO and OECD