2017/28 Peter Bill: Planet Property (2013) ****

Peter Bill was the editor of the Estates Gazette from 1998-2009, after six years as editor of Building magazine and a previous career as a quantity surveyor. Property has long been subject to cycles of boom and bust and his tenure at the EG was particularly thrilling because it included the most spectacular cycle since the 1930s. The book includes extracts from interviews with many key figures in the property world, including veteran developer Gerald Ronson who said, "Unless we get a dose of inflation it will take the banks ten years to work through their losses." We didn't get much inflation, interest rates have been sustained at unprecedented low levels and the banks are still struggling to rebuild their balance sheets.

A gathering frenzy amongst banks to lend too much, with little caution, is nothing new. Two predecessor books, both by financial journalists, told the story from the 1930s onward. Oliver Marriott's 1968 classic The Property Boom focuses on the key players involved in the long boom from 1945. Alastair Ross-Goobey, also an investment fund manager charts the crash of 1972 as well as that of 1989-90 in Bricks and Mortals, with some particularly good interviews and profiles.

I found these huge market fluctuations and the fortunes won and lost completely fascinating as soon as I entered the world of property in 1977. Peter Bill does a good job in condensing what he learned and experienced in the subsequent period into a pretty well-focused account. At times it feels like a collection of his leaders but those were his key thoughts about the issues of the day and his use of them is understandable. Perhaps most fascinating for the non--property person is his explanation of how Planet Property works. Property folk are very sociable and in what he states to have been the best job ever, he attended perhaps three thousand breakfasts lunches, cocktail parties and dinners, truly putting his liver on the line in the cause of journalism. And he got to go to some very fancy restaurants and to drink some outstanding wines. He concludes that the property world is still very closed and male-dominated, to its ultimate disadvantage. His explanation of the pecking order within the estate agency world particularly well and highlights the taboo of referring to commercial property agents as "estate agents," a term reserved for house agents.

Alcohol still plays an important part but younger property people spend a lot more time in front of a screen than at the pub and the world of large surveying firms changed enormously as a result of Big Bang and the unstoppable waves of global investment that crashed upon the UK market from the late 1990s, particularly from the United States. This pressure catalysed many mergers and distorted the market, compressing investment yields well below long term trends. There is a paradox with investment yields: the lower they are, the more the investment is worth. The effect occurs relatively rapidly because there are a relatively small number of modern, high quality investment properties. Shrewd investors sell when the price becomes unrealistically high and new investors eventually get burned.

Philip Green is revealed as pretty much the obnoxious bully that we might have expected, Sir John Ritblat's detestation of too-clever-by-half young analysts seems perfectly reasonable and Mike Slade of Helical Bar comes out of it as a very shrewd cookie but also a very nice chap. A most enjoyable read and nicely modest, with the wryness of an outsider looking in.