Next stop: a lift for London as the Elizabeth Line opens

EDITOR’S COMMENT I feel like we were all train nerds over the past week or so as the opening of the Elizabeth Line neared. I spoke separately with three real estate chief executives who brought up Crossrail unbidden, giddy with excitement about what it will do for journey times, footfall and the rent they can achieve on their properties – OK, especially the rent they can achieve on their properties. Their enthusiasm was equal to that of the four-year-old who lives two doors down from me, who has progressed from being obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine to wanting to travel on every Tube line – and now just has Lizzie left to tick off his list. Good on him. I remember navigating the Underground for the first time alone as a teenager and wondering then at how complex it all felt but also how awesome it was. That sounds ridiculous given how much most of us now moan about it. But I don’t care, I still love it. And good on those chief executives too. They should be allowed a bit of excitement given everything the economy is throwing at them at the moment. And goodness knows they’ve had a wait. Back in early 2018, writing for Financial News, I spoke with a bunch of developers about the schemes they were preparing along the line. At the time, the first phases were expected to open by the end of the year. That summer it was pushed back a year. When I left to join EG in mid-2019, my former colleagues made me a joke front page, on which one of the stories asked if the line would ever open.  But now it’s actually here. The trains are running. There are already some delays and some of the stations aren’t open, but it’s here. And my social media feeds are full of grown-ups from across the built environment looking like kids in the London Transport Museum. A particular shout-out to Farebrother’s Alistair Subba Row, who posted a perfectly composed picture of himself between eastbound and westbound platform signs – ever the Midtown man. “Just what London needs to bounce back,” he wrote. That could well be true. Click here to read a great dive into what the Elizabeth Line has done and could do for the capital’s real estate. On the one hand you have what Alexander Jan, chief economist at the London Property Alliance, calls the “announcement effect” – developers making plays based on the expected benefits. Office rents have already risen far beyond the pace of the broader market at some locations along the line. Companies have rushed to sub-markets such as Farringdon ahead of the line opening. But now that it’s open, a lot of people think the best is yet to come as locations right the way along the line find themselves a destination for people further and further away. Oliver Bamber, Savills’ central London investment director, calls it a “secondary bounce”, and it sounds like it will be worth the wait. I think I might be talking myself into becoming a trainspotter. Who’s with me? Bear with me just a bit longer (and this is more important than trains), because I also want to highlight the amazing work done by Emma Sinclair and the team behind RefuAid, who have brought together some 150 companies from across the UK to provide jobs and training for refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. The initiative has already had fantastic support from some of the biggest names in business, and now a scale-up has brought in even more, including several from the built environment such as Persimmon, Kier and Gleeds. The new cohort is looking to provide six months of full-time English, recertification and resettlement skills. As Sinclair puts it, the goal is to ensure we don’t have “neurosurgeons working as care assistants, marine engineers driving us in the back of their cabs and lawyers stacking supermarket shelves”. She adds: “We all desperately need to hire skilled people – and when people are displaced by conflict through no fault of their own, they should have the chance to lead professionally fulfilled lives.” A new cohort is due to be announced in the summer. I’m hoping to see even more real estate names get involved. To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews Photo: Transport for London