By the time you read this edition, the first in a series of stages of the Great Unlocking will have occurred and many a pub garden will be overflowing with discarded plastic pint glasses and the remains of many a meal. We can only hope, and if you are minded to pray, that in the UK at least, this will be the last time that we are ‘locked down’ due to the impact of Covid-19.

As the roads get busier and our economy returns to some degree of normality, many of us who, having been ‘confined to barracks’ for so long, will be looking forward to getting away this summer or at least from 21st June, when the final stage of the government’s roadmap will be completed. And then, as we allude to in our article on page 22 about Staycations, the roads leading in and out of our seaside resorts in the UK will without question be much busier, if not gridlocked. On the same theme of holiday lets as a strategy for investing on page 36, John Corey makes some interesting observations worth noting. And on page 56 we also have a useful piece from Liam Henry and Zad Butt on the theme of Capital Allowances for holiday lets.  

Our lead interview on page 19 is with Peter Dabner and rather than going to any far flung places, his company’s firm focus is on staying local, an approach which as you will read, has clearly paid dividends over many years.

One of the key sectors, apart from hospitality and tourism, which has been severely affected in the last 12 months is of course the student sector and many a landlord with a portfolio relying on it for their income from overseas students, will likely have experienced some testing times since March 2020. As such in our annual review of the sector on page 15 we assess prospects for the upcoming academic year and as you will learn the prospects ahead do seem more promising.