Smiles all around

Star JP Morgan real estate analyst Harm Meijer and his team recently published their 2013 forecasts – and they made for very encouraging reading.

The key message underlined the strong capital flows into markets and the belief that we are entering bubble territory for prime real estate in core Western European countries, which will prompt investors to move up the risk curve and invest in secondary assets.
Experienced management teams will be able to raise capital cheaply. To illustrate the point, almost 90% of listed property management teams (as surveyed by JP Morgan) expect capital raisings in the sector over the coming months.

The report also specifically highlighted London in stating:

“The ‘London is booming theme’ will carry on next year and we expect John Burns, CEO of Derwent London, to say at our conference in January again: ‘I can’t say it is bad, when it is good’.”

Shaftesbury too recently affirmed that London is more vibrant than ever.

“And we agree with that. The interest rate for London itself is too low. Valuations will rise further, but we believe there will be more talk about property values, after those have further surprised on the upside, and the coming residential boom in 2013.”

That sounds good to me and we share the sentiment.

Inspired is delighted to have acquired 19 sites during 2012. These will ultimately produce some 84 units of mostly residential accommodation in Inner London (typically Zone 2) locations and will be worth a total in excess of £20m on completion, with margins on cost typically exceeding 50% and in some cases even 100%+.

Such impressive returns are the result of a bold contrarian approach in a nervous market, not to mention an awful lot of very hard work. We couldn’t have achieved it all without the help of the people we have had the privilege of working with over the past year including friends, family, investors, lenders, professional advisers, and our Inspired team.

Our objective has always been to establish an efficient business in which we and all our stakeholders would benefit. 2012 was the year we could truly say we succeeded in that aim.

I have absolutely no doubt that we will do even better this year and look forward to working both harder and smarter to achieve the best possible results. After all, it’s not really work when you’re having so much fun, is it?!