Privilege is a gift and should not be wasted

EDITOR’S COMMENT Many years ago we published an annual property rich list. Compiled by the same team that pulls together The Sunday Times Rich List, it was one of our most read articles. Everyone loved to know how much someone was “worth”. I loved it. But it was grotesque. And was sending completely the wrong message about real estate. We published our last Estates Gazette Rich List in 2015. We toyed with publishing a philanthropy list as an antithesis to the rich list, but it turned out that no-one really wanted to share what good they were doing. Perhaps it was sense of not wanting to appear vulgar, showing off about how charitable they were, or perhaps it was the industry’s inability to tell a story about itself that endeared it to the general public. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. Now, you may be wondering why I’m talking about something we stopped doing five years ago. It’s because I wasn’t sure how to respond to the open letter, signed by more than 120 millionaires and released at Davos this week, asking their fellow millionaire and billionaire friends to support higher taxes on themselves. Was this a massive PR stunt? A great letter that will be tomorrow’s fish and chip paper? Or was this a real shift in human behaviour and desire? A shift away from the need to always want more (taught to us all through basic economics) to the desire to have enough. Enough for everyone. Like Mr Fink’s letter to his fellow chief executives, it really is a great letter. “We make this request as members of the most privileged class of human being ever to walk the earth,” it states. “Extreme, destabilising inequality is growing across the globe. Today, there are more billionaires on earth than ever before, and they control more wealth than they ever have…In many nations, tensions caused by inequality have reached crisis levels. Low social trust and a pervasive sense of unfairness are diminishing basic social cohesion… This will be disastrous for everyone, including millionaires and billionaires.” It goes on to say that now is the time to act and that “taxes are the best and only appropriate way to ensure adequate investment in the things our society needs”. It calls out its own people on tax avoidance and evasion, claiming they have reached epidemic proportions. Studies show that at least $8tn is hidden in tax havens, with $15tn passing through empty corporate business shells with no real business activities. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? We all know that real estate can be a very lucrative business. It can make people a lot of money, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I couldn’t see a single real estate “name” on the Millionaires Against Pitchforks letter. Not a single name that for 13 years we listed in the EG Rich List. That saddens me because I know the industry cares. I know that there are so many very generous, charitable individuals and businesses in this sector. But can I see the industry ever calling for itself to be taxed more? Can I see it not use offshore SPVs to buy and hold assets? Can I see a day where we are not calling Monaco or the Cayman Islands for interviews with property billionaires? I hope so, but I’m not sure. So maybe it is time to resurrect that idea of a property philanthropy list. A list that celebrates how industry is doing its bit to end inequality. How it is acting to repair, as the letter states, “our fractured world”, and being part of the solution. Privilege is a wonderful gift, it should not be wasted.