Tony Pidgley was very down on the market at the Newport Resi conference this year. The newly crowned chairman of Berkeley stood in front of an audience of industry professionals, and warned that it would be "at least two years before we see any good signs of recovery". He anticipates further price falls, warned that purchasers were "sitting on their hands" and condemned the hosuebuilding industry for losing track of common sense - "Every crime we could committ, we did committ", was how he put it.
All this has been said before, and was said by others at the conference. But this is Tony Pidgley. He has correctly called the market before, and is now expected to look into his crystal ball every time and map out where the market will be and when. When I spoke with an anlayst about the conference this morning, all he wanted to know was what Pidgley had said.
Although the Berkeley boss might well be rightly held in this revered position, there were discontented mumblings in Newport this year. When he told the conference it could be a "four, five or six year dip", agents felt he was unneccessarily gloomy, other developers recited reasons for cautious optimism, and even economists were more bullish.
But, he has been right before. It remains to be seen whether he is right again.
