Invest & Fund

02/09/2026

Like it or loathe it, the frontier of A. I. development is based on two fronts: compute power and algorithmic sovereignty, and the compute power story really is a story about buying land.

Is there an unforeseen conflict between the needs of the hyperscalers and the needs of UK homebuilders?

We explore below!

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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....

24/08/2026

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 against what we forsaw.

In this week's piece, we look back at some of our calls over the last few years and see what we got right & wrong in relation to what our sector looks like today.

Read more below!

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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!

20/08/2026

In this week's blog, we look at potential problems brewing in the new-build market, as revealed in the latest UK House Price Index, and discuss how being years ahead of the curve in scrutinising and stress-testing exit strategies has historically protected both our borrowers and lenders.

Read more below!

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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 new-build homes.

28/07/2026

The RICS's latest Residential Market Survey shows some signs of tentative stabilisation in the market, and perhaps even cause for cautious optimism.

We unpack how that affects our developers in this week's blog.

Read more below!

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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 Analys...

21/07/2026

The haze of the solstice saw a World Cup running deep into July, and as the entire country fought circadian rhythm disorders associated with punishing late-night sporting schedules, a new Prime Minister quietly slipped into Downing St.

In this week's blog, we unpack the summer distractions and how housing markets have reacted to the baking heat.

Read more below!

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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

14/07/2026

Years ago, the development appraisal functioned as a bit of a sales document, a case for the deal, assembled to clear a hurdle.

Those days are long over; in an era of enhanced scrutiny, it's now reverting to what it should always have been: a truth-telling exercise shared among borrower, broker and lender.

Read more below!

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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 s...

07/07/2026

In this week's blog, we talk about what the housing market really needs: senior debt, drawn in stages against certified progress, from lenders that understand residual land values and can move at the speed of a purchase deadline.

The homes needed will not arrive via headline policies and huge-scale developments; they will arrive on sites most people will never read about, financed by private capital that understood the arithmetic before Westminster.

Read more below!

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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 between July

29/06/2026

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 worryin...

22/06/2026

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.

Our immediate thoughts below as we look at Andy Burnham's record in Greater Manchester and how that could translate to a national housing agenda.

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 gov...

09/06/2026

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's industrial past, producing the housing of Britain's future.

Read more below!

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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's industrial