There isn’t much left, anyone sensible would say, that is immune from the housing crash and a consequent economic slowdown. Not the housebuilders (900 jobs have just gone at Taylor Wimpey), not the Scottish property market (volumes have now dried up), not Marks & Spencer (like-for-like sales are down 5%), not central London houses (estate agents now say even Chelsea prices must fall 20%), not the stockmarket (now down nearly 20% from its year-high) and not car sales (Pendragon reports miserable business).
But there’s always a company out there that really thinks it is different. This time round it is the Candy brothers, Nick and Christian, self-styled property providers to the super-rich. The pair have, says the FT, spent around £1.5bn buying up land in London’s top postcodes in the last three years (ie, at the height of a whopping great bubble) and making grand plans to develop it into luxury housing complete with endless private lifts, entry-level eye scanners, bullet-proof everything and cinematic walls.
This, say the brothers, is a sector of the market that won’t ever go down: the people operating in it are too rich to care about mortgages or credit crunches. So, Nick told the FT, in an exact echo of the mutterings of the ordinary housing bulls as their market started to collapse around them, prices in his market should “at worst” be flat for a bit.
This is the voice of someone who hasn’t seen many cycles come and go. History shows that flat markets are as rare as hens’ teeth: mostly they are going up or going down, often at speed.
Still, there are a few other signs that all is not well in Candyland, says Peter Bill in the Evening Standard. In 2006 they bought the old Middlesex Hospital site just north of Oxford Street for £175m, but need a partner to fund the construction of flats on 900,000 sq ft of the site. They’ve told Bill a deal was on the way but in the meantime the site is “mothballed”. Eighteen months ago I don’t suppose any of this would have mattered much – the Candys could easily have found another buyer for the whole site with its planning permission if necessary. Today they probably can’t.
Personally, I don’t buy the idea that there are enough very high net worth nut-cases (what do you need to have done to genuinely require a panic room, bullet-proof glass and an eye scanner?) knocking around to buy all the flats the Candys are planning to build. But even if there are, that won’t do them much good if they can’t put them up.
A final reason to worry? Nick has plans for Candy & Candy stores, where you will be able to buy “a nice selection of candles”. Scented candles were an integral part of make-your-house-look-like-a-showhome obsession of the bubble. But as no one actually uses them, their sales can’t possibly survive the crash. Nothing’s immune.