Manchester sold itself to Abu Dhabi’s elite - Guardian article

[Dirty Harry]

the fact he waffles on about Der Spigel in the first part of this, you know his agenda.

Yes, that should set alarm bells ringing, no explanation about how they were were pieced together etc to make it look like an actual straight conversation, weird fucker, hopefully someone from the council will respond.

 

[Turtlepath]

especially when you see his articles about racism and he comes out with that.

Yep, v true. I myself am strongly anti-discriminatory, i will not be changing that no matter who offered me a few quid to do so. Seems this journalist chap happily did though. Still, lets crack on with next season and see how many ranty breakdowns he has then.

 

[JASR]

Did they mention Russia and China ?
Goodness knows who London sold out to.

This.

And it’s even worse regarding the Russian money, they bought expensive sought after property, and were waved through for over a decade. Their spending did nothing for the poorer local community, just pushed up the already insane London house prices, whilst laundering their oligarch dubiously obtained money through Limited liability partnership (LLP) business fronts.

(I know less about Chinese investment into uk)

Abu Dhabi investment in Manchester, has been mainly about regeneration.
So what if it turns them some profit, no-one else seemed to care about doing something for the local community, and building a full range of housing.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

I’m sure MCC sold the land to the highest bidder. Or maybe the only bidder as Ancoats was an absolute shithole 5 years ago.

Affordable housing is an issue whomever the developer is.

 

[bakerdave76]

Is this fake? Guardian towers Abu Dhabi.

 

[hammocity]

This.

And it’s even worse regarding the Russian money, they bought expensive sought after property, and were waved through for over a decade. Their spending did nothing for the poorer local community, just pushed up the already insane London house prices, whilst laundering their oligarch dubiously obtained money through Limited liability partnership (LLP) business fronts.

(I know less about Chinese investment into uk)

Abu Dhabi investment in Manchester, has been mainly about regeneration.
So what if it turns them some profit, no-one else seemed to care about doing something for the local community, and building a full range of housing.

I believe it’s Hong Kong money that’s responsible for a lot of investment properties especially in the Manchester area. During Covid I read 40% of properties around here were purchased by HK Investors who bought mainly to rent, the prices are insane, I’m no expert but this must have had an effect in pushing property prices up.

 

[Man_City_Loyal]

Yep, v true. I myself am strongly anti-discriminatory, i will not be changing that no matter who offered me a few quid to do so. Seems this journalist chap happily did though. Still, lets crack on with next season and see how many ranty breakdowns he has then.

he sounds a jealous type. Be interesting to see where he lives in the UK

 

[unexpected item]

On those odd occasions when the likes of TalkShite actually get round to talking about Manchester City, and after all the chat about limitless funds and expensive bench warmers, the no nowt pundits usually end up saying something along the lines of..."The regeneration of East Manchester has been a good thing though."

This article will get shared far and wide, and that particular line of praise will be no more. More likely to be accompanied by the words...questionable deals, or similar.

For the City haters, it's a Job Done.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

Is this fake? Guardian towers Abu Dhabi.View attachment 50440

Seems legit...

 

[domalino]

There are a number of accusations in this piece which should be easy to refute. Was the land sold at less than value? Are the leases provided out of line? Is it true that no affordable housing has been built and are the reasons not correct?
Should be easy for the council to blow this out of the water or at least to provide some explanation. Although it is typical of the Guardian to attack anything to do with City, this is a Labour council they are going after which isn't typical.

If you're really interested -




Data gleaned from viability assessments suggests that the prices of land leased by Manchester City Council to Manchester Life are lower than for comparable sites purchased by other developers. When accounting for the price paid per unit, the value of land at Eliza Yard, a 118 Build to Sell development brought forward in 2021, was estimated at £5,600 by the consultancy Savills. This compares to an estimated price paid per unit of roughly £15,000 for the Victoria Riverside site bought by the Hong Kong developers Far East Consortium, and £17,000 for the Fierra Capital development on Long Acre Street, both considered comparator developments by Savills.


In response to our queries, Manchester City Council said that all leases achieved best consideration, were underwritten by a red book valuation at the time and involved the payment of a premium. Variations in the range of prices per unit paid may partially reflect additional costs due to differences in site conditions and may also reflect decisions to sell at different moments in the property market cycle, with land values likely to be lower in the post-recessionary period of 2014 and 2015. It is nonetheless notable that the price per unit paid to developers can be much higher for neighbouring developments even in years like 2016, such as the £38,251 paid for the NCP car park site on Tib Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter – two years before the leaseholds were sold for the One Vesta Street development, where the price paid per unit was considerably lower (figure 5).

The council claims that they have ‘overage’ arrangements in place which may provide them with additional income. However, they were unwilling to disclose the details of those overage arrangements on commercial grounds: e.g. how much are they entitled to, what events trigger the overage payment (does the leasehold need to be sold, for example?) and above what threshold do overage payments kick in? The council also did not provide us with a figure for how much they had received via overage payments in the project overall (i.e. via land, buildings, rental income etc), and we can find no details of these arrangements or record of any overage payments received by the council in their accounts or the public domain generally.

It is important to be sensitive to the conditions of each plot. A lower estimated price per unit paid may also reflect requirements for lower carbon development at, for example, Eliza Yard as a land plot owned by Manchester City Council. However, overall our estimates of the prices paid per unit for other Manchester Life projects suggest that Manchester Life have been able to access land at a cheaper rate than many comparable developments. We estimate that if the leasehold transfers had used a calculation of £17,700 per unit, equivalent to that of Ancoats Gardens, the Council could have leased land to Manchester Life for a total of £17,292,900. This would have generated an additional £12,341,620 in income to the public purse, rather than the £4,951,280 that was actually received.

It should be noted that the market price paid to the council for these leaseholds is also much lower than land bought by the council in the vicinity at market value. For instance, the council bought the nearby Ancoats Retail Park in 2017 at over £3.2m per acre, over four times higher than the average price of the leaseholds paid by Manchester Life entities. The Council may be selling the leasehold at the bottom of the market, while buying land back once a property boom is underway. If that is the case, there are questions to be answered about the council’s stewardship of its land assets and whether they are effectively protecting the option value of their own land assets.

In response to our queries on these features of the development, the council has stated that ‘from the outset Manchester Life was set up to restart the market and be a platform for multiple investors to deliver a significant number of homes on the eastern edge of the city in 2012/15 as a consequence of the earlier financial crisis of 2014/15. The partnership was established with robust financial and structural arrangements to protect the Council’s interests’61. This periodisation is contestable in our view – we would argue that the financial crisis took place in 2007/8 and that by 2014/15 some confidence had returned to real estate markets after significant government and central bank interventions. And whilst the council stresses that their governance arrangements have protected value for money, without evidence of value returned to the council we have no means of assessing that claim. In our view, the comparably low rates paid for the leaseholds for land in the absence of competition raise value for money questions.