With the first day of #mipim2024 upon us, many from the property world will be over in Cannes with diaries full of meetings, seminars, lunches, dinners or a coffee with a new contact along La Croisette.
St James Securities aren’t there, however our friends from Marketing Derby and Derby City Council are attending and hopefully are doing what they do best, selling the opportunities in thier great City, including our #Becketwell mixed use city centre regeneration development.
While the Derby contingent do there thing in Cannes, I’ve found a large stack of old Chartered Surveyor Weekly (CSW), now Property Week magazines from 1979 to 1992. Being the nerd that I am, I sat down after dinner with my cup of tea to skim through some of the old editions.
It’s fascinating to see how much has changed over the last 40 years or so. Many property practices merged, sold out to financial institutions then bought themselves back out for a song again. The changes to our towns and cities with the proliferation of out of town retailing, kicked off with the Metro Centre (on EZ land!) and our attitude to the world outside of the UK is all there to see.
It’s this latter point that made me write this note, there on a single page (15) in the 15 March 1990 edition is a piece on MIPIM.
Interesting to note is that only one firm from the UK, Conrad Ritblat, took a stand there. Philip Lewis said his firm made a host of new contacts as people seek to invest in British property.
The article above that has a header “UK agents stay away from Cannes”…..Stephen Clues of Richard Ellis says “People in the UK are sceptical of property exhibitions” but best of all is Weatherall Green & Smith’s reticence when they say “Despite being an international firm we felt it would have been something of a gamble”
How times change.
To everyone who’s there representing their firms, towns, cities or regions; I wish you a fantastic and productive MIPIM. I’m sure you’ll get so much more out of it than our colleagues from 1990 ever dreamed.
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