Happy Pills | Bouncing Back | Holiday Dreams

Like many of our readership, The Weekly consigned a tumultuous 2020 to the dustbin of history with great hopes for a fresh start and better fortunes for us all in 2021. Ten days into the new year and there is an ever increasing (and rather depressing) feeling of déjà vu. Soaring virus cases; an NHS under intense pressure; another national lockdown; and a return to home-schooling. If ever there was a case for a seismic dose of the "January blues", this is it. The Weekly, however, has always been an optimist at heart. And there is plenty of room for conditional optimism in 2021. A Brexit deal has (finally) been agreed. Trump is on his way out (whether he accepts it or not). And, with a fair wind, three approved vaccines provide an exit route to the nightmare of this pandemic. In the meantime, The Weekly has self-prescribed a hearty measure of Boris-strength optimism to get us through. Just think, when this is all over, you might miss starting Mondays with a 30-minute Joe Wicks workout and a Year 3 home science experiment!

Savills delivered their annual cross-sector outlook this week, predicting a bounce-back in commercial investment volumes through Q2 and Q3 as the current restrictions are lifted and GDP recovers. At least with the Brexit fear factor removed, the expectation is that the commercial market will see a "normal" post-recession recovery. You may not be surprised to learn that Savills expects the winners in 2021 to be logistics (the sector has proved the continued exception to the rule during the pandemic) and Tier One City office investment, both in London and the regions. We agree with them. The office will still have a vital role to play in the post-Covid era. Perhaps most insightful though were Savills views on the residential sector which witnessed annual house price growth of +7.3% at the same time as the economy was plunged into a recession. With Government interventions such as the SDLT holiday and the Help-to-Buy Scheme scheduled to come to an end, the market will soon have to face the economic fallout of the pandemic without a Government safety blanket. The headline Covid casualty this week was Lone Star’s aborted £3bn sale of Quintain, the residential company that owns 85-acres at Wembley Park with planning permission for 8,000 rental homes. Had it gone ahead, this would have been the country’s largest-ever BTR deal. For investors, however, the fundamentals of under-supply and secure income streams will continue to underpin sector demand. Expect single-family, build-to-rent opportunities to continue to attract investor attention.

As winter bites and lockdown grinds on, Spring sometimes feels like an eternity away. Fret not. Always there to shine a ray of hope (however miniscule!), The Weekly understands that scientists are considering removing a second from time because the planet is rotating so fast. Time keepers say that Earth is currently spinning at the quickest pace in 50 years, and this means that the days are slightly shorter. It is therefore quite possible that a negative leap second will be needed if the Earth's rotation rate increases further. There you go. You are now a whole second closer than you thought to that longed for foreign holiday!