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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

But if you take, for example, Unite, they are the UK's biggest publicly traded student landlord.

Now, 20 years ago, student housing was sort of non-existent as an institutional asset class.

It wasn't really a thing then.

Unite, they managed to raise a small amount of money, IPO-ed, and they've really ridden this huge wave of investment into higher education accommodation for students and have done fantastically well.

And it's developed from what was an incredibly obscure niche asset class into now quite a mainstay real estate investment.

You know, you look at Blackstone, the world's biggest real estate investor, their single biggest sort of bet in UK real estate is in student housing.

So it's become this very mainstream asset.

Now that's a great story.

If you were there in the early, you know, right at the start with Unite, you've done fantastically well, albeit the last couple of years, maybe less so.

So there've been lots of enterprising people who've gone, right, I think this sector or that sector is going to be the next big thing.

So they've maybe raised a bit of capital and then for whatever reason, it hasn't quite worked out.

Again, some of it is timing.

We saw after 2022 when rates blew out,

You know, all the REIT share prices collapsed.

There were people who were then going out talking to investors going, right, this is the start of a new cycle.

This is the time.

Let's raise some capital.

But the trouble is, you know, we then had other shocks that then meant that those companies that maybe they did list, they raised a small amount of capital.

But then very quickly, they were trading at a discount and then they can't raise any more capital and they're kind of stuck.

And so we just had lots and lots of these minnows who did manage to get off the ground, but then never got any further.

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