Presidents Blog - Day 4 at MIPIM

Thursday dawned and with it came the sun; it was a lovely day all day and very warm which made a nice change.
 
After another early morning run with the masses on the sea front I had two breakfast's scheduled in; it's as well that I am managing to fit in some exercise and avoid the booze or the suit may not have fit by the end of the week.
 
Sidell Gibson have run a breakfast on the beach every day this week and this morning's breakfast was heaving; well done to them as it is a open invitation to all attendees and I hope that they get some value from it because it was full of some really good people.
 
I then went to a BPF and JLL breakfast at a cafe on the beach approx 100 yards away. This was all about the future of spec development in London and had speakers from British Land, Barclays Bank, Croydon Council and a Director from JLL in the states and it was professionally managed by Liz Peace the CEO of the BPF (British Property Federation). It was very interesting to hear how the UK compared with the states as the two markets are more similar than I realised particularly with the emergence of Localism. Barclays regrettably were giving typical bank responses which meant that they sat on the fence and nobody was any the wiser. I was on a table with Mike Thompson of Thomas Vale (Birmingham fbe) and also Tim Downing of Yelo Design (fbe Lincoln) . . . small world!
 
The news was circulating that the DT had just named and shamed all the Las that were out at MIPIM, I have not seen the article and it seems that it has been removed from the site by now but it sounds very sensationalist. The LAs have cut back massively as you would imagine they would; no boats, a very stands, no lavish lunches for the masses and good for them i say. They are still competing like the rest of nus for inward investment and government funding so why shouldn't they be at MIPIM.
 
The DT did have some interesting things to say about MIPIM in general if you follow this link;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructionandproperty/7442719/Mipim-property-conference-loses-luxury-to-be-more-serious.html
 
The Manchester and Leeds stands were again very busy and I took the opportunity to wander around the exhibition which I had not managed to do on my last visits to MIPIM and there was a lot going on; it was a good show and there were some good stands and interesting companies.
 
Back to the London stand for some meetings with RMJM, URS and and then lunch on the sea front (see photo of the best sandcastle that I have ever seen)


 
At 3pm it was time for me to leave and catch a bus to the airport for my flight home and I sat at the airport to catch up on some admin and flew home with some of the team from PRP Architects and Wilmott Dixon.
 
All in all an excellent MIPIM, lots of opportunities and hopefully some work to come from it to cover my costs and investment of time.
 
I will finish off tomorrow with my summary and overall thoughts on MIPIM and possible plans for fbe out in Cannes next year.