Not a lot has happened since my last article so I thought I would focus on a more general theme. Some of you will know that I’m very passionate about the game of Chess, more so as to how it can benefit children. It’s always played an important part in my life to the point that we have now signed up our 4th school in SW London which, with the help of the ‘Chess In Schools’ charity, teaches Chess to children as part of the school curriculum.

Some of the many benefits of chess are spatial awareness, consequence of actions and planning ahead. These are particularly prominent in our business, ones that I adopt on a daily basis which help us to adopt various strategies. We all know in property development things don’t always tend to go how we expect them to, so to mitigate/reduce the pain we adopt various strategies. For example, there will be some SME property developers who bought sites around London in early 2017 at 20% margins but who are now looking at either a 5% margin or even a loss!

It happens, and you only need to look at the last two recessions to see who and how some developers survived. So as developers/investors, how can we mitigate against this? We can either buy at higher margins and/or develop other sources of income.