Jack Sidders

speaker

477 appearances 14 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 29 Jul

Jack Sidders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Merryn Talks Money · The UK's Shrinking REITs Sector Is Still Attracting Buyers · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

So if interest rates, in a time when interest rates were very, very low, and therefore bond yields are very, very low, real estate was seen as quite an attractive alternative in which to allocate capital.

because it was throwing off a bit more yield.

So even though yields got sort of squeezed lower and lower and lower, and therefore real estate values pushed up higher and higher and higher, it was still offering a kind of premium over risk-free rates over government debt, over corporate debt as well.

Now, come 2022, the sort of end of the cheap money era, risk-free rates blow out, interest rates go up.

bond yields go up, all of a sudden real estate values had to adjust to reflect that reality, because why are you going to buy an illiquid building that is yielding less than a basically risk-free government bond?

You're not.

So the value has to go down, the yield on the property has to go up in order to make it attractive.

So that is the single most kind of important thing that has happened to commercial real estate as a whole over the last five years.

Now, you mentioned there's then been a whole bunch of other different sort of structural issues within the different types of commercial real estate that have also had a huge impact.

So we had COVID, impact on offices, albeit that, you know, maybe a lot of that was more sentiment than reality.

We've had the rise of online retail and how that's affected the shopping centre.

But conversely, how that's affected the warehouse.

So very simply, generally speaking, bad for shopping centres, good for warehouses.

So those sorts of factors are at play as well.

But then for the REIT sector in particular, so publicly traded real estate, now it's a funny kind of asset class because in theory it sort of should trade like any kind of commercial property.

But the reality is these are publicly traded stocks and therefore they're subject to kind of equity market volatility.

So you mentioned that there were dozens and dozens and dozens of UK REITs, but lots of them were quite small.

And one of the problems is it sort of doesn't necessarily take a much bigger team to run a publicly traded landlord that has 100 billion in assets than it does one that has 1 billion in assets.

So what that means is small REITs are quite expensive to run, which is not great for shareholders.

You've also then had the many and well-documented issues with the UK market and the sort of general lack of liquidity in the UK market and UK assets generally trading at a discount.

Showing 81–100 of 477 · page 5 of 24