Recently in CBRE Category

The Loud Lanky Lad is studying economics at AS level and his teacher seems to have a rather marvellous off-the-wall take on the subject. I have been reading LLL's course books, one called "Free Lunch" is particularly enjoyable and - well behind the rest of you I do appreciate - I have finally caught up with "Freakonomics" where I have learnt the secret to a successful blog......

It's all about reciprocity and back-scratching apparently. Oh the parallels!

Talking of reciprocity and back-scratching, I was out on Monday evening hoovering up the Sauvignon Blanc (which is drug of choice, after all) in the Black and Blue with that old smoothie, Alistair Parker of Cushman and Wakefield, plotting and scheming - as ever - about the British Council for Shopping Centres (BCSC) Conference being held in Manchester 9-11 November.

He is currently chairman of the BCSC of course and puts a huge amount of effort in; the old rogue and his team are planning a really good bash up there at GMex. Alistair has the energy of 10 men and he does tell it how it is. I was picking his brains about retail-led regeneration and he confirmed my suspicions that most of the old models are past their sell-by dates and we will need a new paradigm. He says it could be TIFs. I threw in my usual quip (somewhat glib and irresponsible, I do concede) about how TIFs were only a new form of debt and he got very agitated with me. Told me to shut up in fact. How very rude!   

I was on the blower with my boss at CB Richard Ellis, Adrian Bunnis, (referred to, in genuine reverence, by his team as "The Bunni" - I think in some oblique cross-reference to "The Jedi"; actually and, I say this in all sincerity, the humour of surveyors is one of the very best things about them), anyway, we were having one of our immensely pleasurable rows about urban regeneration and the Royal Docks when he burst into fits of laughter.

Well, says I, in best huffy tone, "If you're just going to laugh at me then I'm going," whereupon he explained that, looking out of his office window at the Maplin across the street (you know, the one in Cheapside) he's seen two of our best boys-in-blue apprehend a shoplifter and retrieve a veritable pile of clobber from every pocket of this bloke's voluminous coat (which had clearly been designed for the purpose).

Well! I got a blow-by-blow account of every article of kit that was retrieved before blokey was carted off in the meat wagon and Adrian clearly enjoyed every minute of it (and I guess I did too, if somewhat at one remove). Nice to see a professional at work, we agreed (although couldn't be that much of a professional since he got caught).

Makes a change from our usual argy-bargy about the quality of the output from the housebuilder industry anyway.

I rather like that advertisement currently running with the bloke who is accompanied everywhere by his hair. There's a great shot of the bloke playing a duet with his hair at the piano (pictured below) and it makes me laugh. His hair looks just like a bush in my old mum's back garden and now every time I look at that bush it makes me laugh too. These days, you have to get your pleasures where you can.

And - as some smart media researcher has shrewdly identified - that advertisement reminds me a little of my own relationship with my hair. I have a lot of hair. A lot. And my hair certainly has a life and soul of its own.

My hairdresser, Vince, who happens to be a property developer (trust me to end up with some geezer who drops his comb at the slightest provocation to take some call about nine acres in Nuneaton), always says "Sadek's got s**t hair", which is a tad disloyal - to say the least! Well, as I say, I have a lot of hair, and he has to tackle it as Dr Livingston would hack through the jungle.

In the teeth of opposition from old Vince there (he was the one who did Columbia Road Flower Market - clever boy!), I have been growing my hair. Of course, the received wisdom from the salon fraternity is that it is not acceptable for - ahem - mature ladies to have long hair but, as my wise friend the lovely Lesley Fletcher says, rather robustly: "Take no notice of your hairdresser's views of ladies of a certain age and long hair - it's a conspiracy. They all do it to ensure you continue visiting them every six weeks. Work it out on an annual basis - it's a good regular income!" Oh wise words from a woman with immaculate hair.

Sometimes there are strange, slightly bizarre, pleasures to be had from being part of a global corporate such as CB Richard Ellis, with over 300 offices worldwide (as they say: "Two thirds of the world is covered by water. The rest is covered by us" WOW! You do get a sort of testosterone-surge don't you?)

I've been here over two years now, and am obviously now well-established on the e-mail system. Every morning I wake up to a fresh bout of company-wide e-mails clearly written in English (in the main) but, frankly, as opaque to me as those I receive written in German or Spanish.

This morning, alongside the "UK Debt Briefing" (and before the Research Department gets cross, I DO actually read these and learn things), is the inevitable: "The broker has elected to send this exclusive to the RCM1 broker database. This email is sent to the brokerage community at the request of our client. If you are not interested in receiving any future buy-side submissions, please unsubscribe below......".

Nearly at last knockings on the wretched examinations, and frankly the end can't come soon enough. I guess my adolescent kids will then find new ways of putting me through the wringer.

To have a sprog doing A levels at the same time as another sprog doing GCSEs this year is very bad planning on my part, by any objective analysis. My West London Princess and Prince seem to think that the way to pass exams is do nothing all year round and then become a bag of nerves the night before the actual paper. All of this, naturally, justifies them giving their mother a good kicking in the process. And it doesn't seem yesterday that they were bundles of heaving joy, screaming the house down and puking on my best suit before a job interview.

Well, even if they're not swotting, I certainly am! I am still trying to get my head around the emergency regeneration measures in the Pre-Budget Report 08 and Budget 09, both for BURA, and to support m'learned friends in CBRE. And I'm trying to get under the skin of the proposals and ideas put forward by other organisations, such as the lovely Dermot Finch's Centre for Cities and the British Property Federation.