THAT'S THE POINT....???

This amused me today as I read through my first 30 minutes of news etc online -

Then it got me a bit angry really.

If you read the first headline it is all about the benefits to Royal Bank of Scotland in reviving an old family name for a part of their bank, opening new branches on the High St (things going round in circles?!) as their business surveys and advice have been that people like family based names and images for business - good, solid, reliable and not too risky. Just the sort of thing you'd want from somewhere you are taking your hard earned money each week. You get the point.

The second headline is all about market research that suggests people apparently don't like family-based businesses (reader: err.... we've already just covered how people like their reliability haven't we? Polko: yes, stick with me on this...).

Ah, hang on though, it gets better. The article then goes on to suggest that one reason people are not so in favour of family business is because they don't have as much of a voice in business organisations (like the CBI etc) as they do elsewhere. This might be true.

The more powerful argument however, is that family based businesses appear to be boring and slower moving when people want to see 'The Apprentice' style flashy bastards, doing deals, making loads of cash and sitting round in gloss white boardrooms in perfect suits being 'entrepreneurs' (sic - or more like "be sick").

In actual fact, the rest of healthy Europe know the value of family based businesses, low in borrowing, slower moving but growing through time to strong, solid organisations and often producing major products for overseas customers. These firms gain maximum respect in their local areas for being cautious and not throwing away their workforce's pension schemes on some half thought out diversification into property development or online retailing. Google 'Mittelstadt' see what comes up - or better still just click here if you want a quick intro to these types of business.

Sometimes you can come across a similar firm in the UK. Though, it must be said, they are getting thinner on the ground these days. Everybody wants to be a property developer or wannabe Alan Sugar it seems.

Family firms are not boring or conservative. They are dynamic but they take decisions for the long-term, in the best interests of their family members and family members to come. This means they can make much, much longer term decisions and maker braver ones than those looking for a short-term kill.

Long live family businesses. Shame Williams and Glyn's will just be another big corporate bank dressed up in the family's heirlooms.

£5m TO SPEND?

Here's an extract from a very focused interview I just read online.


Question: If you had £5m to invest in commercial property tomorrow, what would you buy?


One response was particularly impressive I thought.


Len Rosso, Head of Logistics & Industrial at Colliers:
I would start by purchasing a site for development as a small multi-let industrial scheme. These are currently in demand and difficult to acquire as a standing investment. For this, I would pay around £1 million with a build cost of circa £600,000 as once fully let it would be worth substantially more hopefully.

I would also acquire five smaller industrial warehouse units at around £300,000 each, ideally brand new or modern, which had been sold over the last 12 months at a discount due to the lack of liquidity within market. When the market improves the capital value of these would go up, but in the meantime a prospective yield of circa seven per cent still looks very attractive.

I would also purchase a mixed-use development site and then apply for commercial usage planning with retail on the ground floor and, ideally, residential above. This would be in a good M25 town or alternatively within one of the London boroughs. I believe this could be purchased for in the region of £1.5 million and once you have achieved planning the value could be raised significantly.

Finally, I would look for small retail/offices within town centres which would have potential residential use above ground floor, spending up to £1 million on these or potentially one unit.


I like the last option - especially the number of pubs that are coming onto the market for conversion to offices below, residential above. So there you have it, after the Lottery this week click back here and take Len's advice. Or not, as you wish.


Full article is here


Good luck.
  

99 PROBLEMS...

 
A growing trend on the web / social media globe is the 99% website.

It's a tumblr blog that hosts people who upload a picture of themselves and their pitiful downtrodden story of how life's hard at the moment.  You get the idea... The website intro says it all, including..

"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution." and other moans.

There's been a lot of press coverage of the blog and how it's a great example of social media enablement of 'the people', ordinary people who want to tell their story and make their voice heard. The 99% of people who do. Apparently.

Trouble is, not many people are listening.  Neither are 99% of people so motivated to try and stand up for things around their world.  We see this every day - how soon the UK riots and the issues they threw up have been buried into the midst of time?

There's a good analysis of it on The Economist's own blog site here.  Basically showing how people are very ready these days to find the facebook page and hit the 'like' or 'become a fan' button.  By doing so, they think that they are making their mark in history.   In actual fact they are probably just making one Mark a very rich man by adding to the masses of data that facebook hold on everyone's likes and dislikes - valuable data to sell on to those who want to sell us something.

A better indicator of social concern the article argues is the #hashtag trend.  If people on twitter are marking up their posts with a specific hashtag, then that must be an indicator of rising popularity. Trouble here too though as people change the hashtags as things get subjectified.  What started as #UKriots might become #Manchesterriot or #riotpictures #rioterspics #cleanuptheriots etc etc  The trend moves and becomes less easy to follow as time evolves.

The 99% website may be better.  To upload you have to upload your photo, type your story into the browser and have in the pic your story actually written in ink (shock horror).  Not many of the pics are in legible writing of course given that they are mainly from people who spend 99% of their time tapping on keyboards rather than with pen in hand (I must also take some of the rap for being like that these days - though anyone who went to school with me will tell you my writing is and always has been pretty crap - left handed you see, that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

So, if it picks up the pace.  If 99% of people do make tracks there and start writing about how their life is crap, it might just make it as a social phenomenon. Me, I'm not putting any money on it.

RIOTS...

Well, Saturday night I was sat in Spain around the pool and enjoying the relaxing atmosphere.  Sunday I was vaguely aware of a rumour of trouble in Tottenham that reflected my childhood in a bizarre way; I was 13 in 1981 and remember the TV footage of Toxteth, Brixton and Handsworth in Birmingham.  My son is 13 now and watching the developing crisis with much the same mixture of fear and amazement.  This time he lives in Manchester so it's a little closer to home than my sleepy medium sized town in the east was..

Night four of rioting has just closed with Manchester, Birmingham and - strangely - Gloucester becoming involved.  The footage is quite extra-ordinary on youtube; St Ann's Square being looted for gods sake, parts of the Arndale on fire? cars driving straight at people just protecting their own homes in Birmingham (with a resulting 3 people dead)?

Soon, hopefully soon the British establishment is going to start asking the awkward questions; the political issues beihnd the reason why this has happened beyond the sheer greed of a few young people who have been brought up on a diet of consumerism and having anything they want without having to work or it, and the generation just above theirs; the twenty-somethings who seem to be in denial that it can be anything to do with social structures and is all about the lack of fairness or disgruntlement with the current government?

To me the only real question is, 'what makes the rioters think they can do this?' but then a good friend just asked me if I honestly thought the rioters even thought before acting...

Good point...

What next for this nation that proudly boasts some of the 'highest' low educational achievement in the West?

Hopefully, the British weather has come to the rescue as it has started raining today and nobody likes getting wet - least of all the pathetic, cowardly little kids that have formed a large number of the looters...

Here's hoping...
 

ECONOMY WATCH..

  

Who knows where the UK economy is heading?

Public sector employment is falling.  That is, in the main, a good thing.  From where I sit - and it is an educated and informed position - the people I've seen losing jobs in the public sector in the past year or two have been well deserved recruits to the dole lines.  The really good ones, the committed individuals, are still there or left in frustration some years ago.

I wouldn't employ many of the recent redundancies let's put it that way.  These are the people who could never quite grasp that the rest of the world wasn't full of 'training days', extended leave periods for illness and the like.  Almost every email to one of these people would get an instant auto-response saying, "sorry I am out of the office until x and will not be receiving my emails...'

But private sector employment took a hit at the beginning of the recession.  And it hasn't picked itself up yet.  Not even to fill the drop in employment from two years ago let alone to create new jobs for all those useful public sector people now sat at home [at this point the reader should not get unduly concerned for their welfare as many of these people are sat on bundles of (our) cash from very attractive redundancy payments let alone the promise of their cosy public sector, final salary pensions kicking in].

So, here's what the graph looks like with some historical perspective...

Who knows where that line is going to turn - up or down?

In short, nobody.

 

I LIKE TO EXCEL!

  
In a single transaction yesterday I downloaded 5,364,510 cells of data on what people do for a living and where they do it in the whole of England, Wales and Scotland.

That's a lot of cells. It breaks Microsoft Excel so you have to build it into an Access database, or preferably SQL, or whatever.

The official data agency that keeps this data for download and analysis couldn't cope with my demands (they place a 1m limit on the downloading of data) so I had to perform the request in 7 chunks. Why the limit? It doesn't take a brain surgeon to split the request and then re-build it at the other end, but it is mighty annoying to have to do so.

But now that I've got my hands on the data I can do amazing things with it when I blend it into my mapping software (there's the SQL bit) and output that to Crystal Reports!  Things that, to my knowledge, no other private sector economist in the country has yet done. Which is good. And keeps Polko a very busy boy.

The problem though is that this data is not good enough.

This is the problem with a lot of UK data to be honest. As one of the leading lights (?) of European economies we should have a great data collection, drilling down into all sorts of very specific areas and allowing a really deep analysis of what is happening at any one time.

The data I have is dated 2008.  The 'new' 2009 data is set to be released some time during December and I will again draw the whole of it into my web.  But, come on.  It shouldn't take 12 months after data is collected to collate it, check it, set it in the correct format for people to download, etc.  Not in the 21st Century.  I'd like to bet if the government were to outsource this data collection to a private company - and they are already out there - it would be 'on the shelves' and ready to use within half that time.  Maybe less.

In fact, in a conversation I had with the Office for National Statistics last week I was told 'there are issues' with the release data and they hinted at it being late..

The data I have details where people work, what type of business they work in, male or female and whether full or part time pretty well. But why can I not then get data that shows me how old they are? A simple addition but it might be useful?

Like I said, outsource this stuff. 

There are companies out there that colllect millions of credit card transactions and banking transactions on a daily basis and I can buy summaries for any area of how much people are spending, on what, where and their age and even type of house they live in.  This data is updated on a monthly basis and I can have it for September right now if I want it.

Think about it: This guy's salary is your tax.

 

A tired 12 month old dataset that a group of civil servants have been using for a pillow in a darkened basement room in Whitehall is just not good enough.