On the capital’s all-consuming faith in bricks and mortar

I am Chelsea Bloom, and I cover London business from a desk in North London and a notebook full of scepticism; my columns live at my page. As reported across The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, the story is worth a closer look.

On the capital’s all-consuming faith in bricks and mortar

London has many faiths, but the dominant religion, the one that commands the deepest devotion and the largest sacrifices, is property, and the estate agents are its priests, interpreting the mysteries and collecting the offerings.

Markets are often described as rational, but anyone who has covered them for long knows they run as much on mood as on maths, on confidence and fear and the herd instinct dressed up as analysis, the spreadsheet a costume worn over the older and less flattering drivers of human behaviour.

The London property religion commands a devotion that no actual faith approaches, the entire population obsessed with prices and ladders and the sacred goal of ownership, the conversations dominated by property, the anxieties centred on it, the estate agents serving as the priests who interpret the mysteries of the market and collect their generous offerings. Property is the London religion, ownership the salvation, the estate agent the priest.

The Detail That Matters

What this religion conceals is the genuine dysfunction it worships, the property obsession disguising a broken market, the devotion to ownership papering over the impossibility of it for so many, the religion of property thriving on the dysfunction it refuses to name. The faith disguises the crisis, the devotion to property obscuring the brokenness of the market it worships.

The most revealing question in any business story is who benefits, followed closely by who bears the risk, and the two are very often not the same people, the benefit and the risk separated by arrangements that the official account is careful not to dwell upon.

What It Comes Down To

It comes down to this: the London property religion is a devotion to a dysfunctional market, the obsession with ownership thriving on the very impossibility that makes it a crisis, the estate-agent priests collecting their offerings from a congregation worshipping a broken god.

What looks from outside like a single confident institution is, from inside, a collection of anxious people making decisions under uncertainty, and remembering this human reality behind the corporate facade is the beginning of understanding how business actually works.

So I will keep covering the London property religion, the devotion and the priests and the broken market it worships, reading the obsession as the symptom of dysfunction it is, the business journalist as sceptical observer of the capital’s all-consuming faith in bricks and mortar.

The London economy is a vast machine for converting effort into wealth, but the conversion is uneven, the effort and the wealth distributed by arrangements that reward some inputs lavishly and others barely, and the journalist’s job is to notice the unevenness the official story smooths over.

Every business trend arrives in London wrapped in the language of inevitability, presented as the future that has already decided to happen, and the useful scepticism is to remember that most predicted futures do not arrive, and that inevitability is a sales technique more than a forecast.

A useful habit is to read the footnotes before the headline, since the headline is written to be quoted and the footnotes are written to be true, and the distance between the two is frequently the whole of the story worth telling.

London attracts capital from everywhere, and with the capital comes a certain weightlessness, businesses that exist more as financial structures than as makers of anything, and distinguishing the productive from the merely financial is a recurring task.

The word disruption has been so thoroughly drained of meaning by overuse that its appearance in a pitch now functions mainly as a warning, a signal that the speaker would prefer you admired the novelty rather than examined the economics.

Behind every confident quarterly statement is a quieter reality of revised assumptions and quietly buried projects, and the seasoned reader learns to weigh the confidence of the announcement against the silence around what was dropped.

The hard part of business journalism is not finding what companies say about themselves, which they supply in abundance, but working out the gap between the saying and the doing, the distance between the press release and the practice, which is where the actual story almost always lives.

I have learned to be most suspicious of the figures presented most confidently, the projections rendered as certainties, the growth charts that bend upward as if the future were a thing already filed away, because the confidence is usually inversely proportional to the evidence behind it.

London business runs on a peculiar mixture of genuine innovation and elaborate theatre, and the journalist’s task is to separate the two, to find the real value being created beneath the performance of value, the substance under the spectacle, which is harder than it sounds.

Markets are often described as rational, but anyone who has covered them for long knows they run as much on mood as on maths, on confidence and fear and the herd instinct dressed up as analysis, the spreadsheet a costume worn over the older and less flattering drivers of human behaviour.

The most revealing question in any business story is who benefits, followed closely by who bears the risk, and the two are very often not the same people, the benefit and the risk separated by arrangements that the official account is careful not to dwell upon.

For more in this vein, The Daily Mash obliges.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com