Build it up

Ground-Breaking: How the Commercial Property Market Got off the Ground, 1950-75. By Vivian Linacre. Linacre Communications Ltd; 169 pages; £7.98. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

COMMERCIAL property may be one of the world’s biggest asset-classes, but it is still poorly understood by the public at large. Stock and commodity prices and bond yields are quoted in every newspaper; residential-housing values are among the most frequent subjects of upscale dinner-table conversation. In contrast, even now that the sum of commercial property in Britain is worth around 40% of the country’s stockmarket, the business of building and renting shops, offices, factories, warehouses and hotels is still surprisingly opaque.

In “Ground-Breaking” Vivian Linacre, an experienced surveyor and developer, aims to fill this gap with a first-person account of the evolution of the British commercial-property industry between 1950 and 1975. The early part of his story evokes an era that feels quite antiquated, with post-war food rationing and squads of female stenographers diligently typing out letters that male estate agents had recorded on Dictaphones. Once Mr Linacre moves north to Scotland, the outlines of the modern market quickly come into focus, even though road and rail access was still slow. His firm built the first “speculative” office and retail projects in Edinburgh, which means they were built without prior commitment from a tenant, and the first enclosed mall and suburban office development in Scotland.

“Ground-Breaking” provides copious detail on dozens of Mr Linacre’s buildings. Although the specifics of each structure can be hard to keep straight, some notable patterns emerge that remain hallmarks of the industry. Chief among these is the obstinacy of local planning boards, who without thinking oppose all new development and whose inability to understand property finance leads to highly inefficient tendering processes. Once permits are granted and a building goes up, the councils of neighbouring towns frequently undermine each other by approving unnecessary projects that compete for the same tenants.

But Mr Linacre seems more interested in profiling the property tycoons he bumped elbows with and whingeing about taxes and bureaucracy than in offering systematic analysis of the industry’s growth or teasing out the implications of his tale for the present day. In the introduction, he wonders whether the investment portfolios of insurance companies and pension funds were essential to the development of the modern market or merely a helpful catalyst; the book never provides an answer. The conclusion predicts that institutional property investors will soon turn their focus towards residential property. But the author neither explains why this shift has taken so long to occur in Britain nor addresses the parallel market in America, where Wall Street firms have gobbled up thousands of foreclosed homes.

“Ground-Breaking” is intended to be part memoir and part history. Unfortunately, the book is rather too lopsided towards the former.