I was recently sitting in an airport departure lounge, and struck up a conversation with a guy on the next table who turned out to be a fellow property developer, albeit one from the far more fertile grounds of the South East of England. That is where our similarities ended, and it was incredible to learn just how different his experience of the current property market was to mine. While he's out there hunting for sites on which to build flats, we have land-banked sites in the Midlands on which we're not planning on building-out for 10 years or more.

When you talk to fellow developers, the conversation usually follows a similar theme: sites, prices, materials, sub-contractors and estate agents; but he caught me out with a new question: "It's been nearly six years now, but do you remember where you were when Lehman Brothers crashed?"

The 158-year-old bank crashed on the 15th of September 2008, kick-starting the Great Recession, shaking the economic world and causing a chain reaction with the consequences still being played out. The 'Lehman effect' has become a recognised term for the financial service sectors' misdemeanours.