There is a distinct danger that I may never do another deal again at this rate, but at the risk of further alienating the honourable and esteemed investment agency constituency, here goes….

“Exchange to take place 20 days from receipt of full documentation.”

If we disregard cash deals, hands up everyone who actually believes that complex multi-let assets, requiring some modest level of bank funding, can be closed in little more time than the England rugby team went from being potential world cup winners to a creatine fuelled version of the football team?

Let’s be fair, even back in the days when Peter Cummings was personally tipping wheel barrows of cash into the boots of any fat bloke with a Bentley, there were certain hoops that needed to be jumped through.

However we are now in an age where everyone in a process wants to cover their less well remunerated derrieres and only the clinically insane close for cash assuming they can refi later, so something akin to 30 days followed by simultaneous exchange and completion would seem to be a little realistic, we have tried to suggest.

Alas pragmatism seems to be in short supply with vendors and their advisors, who clearly have NEVER EVER spent more than the regulation four weeks to close a deal, so the HoT say 20 days, but the covering email says it won’t be enforced………

I, like many other people, have remarked over the last couple of months, that the market feels very much like the last days of the Roman Empire, sorry, 2006 with higher and higher prices being driven by a huge wall of liquidity looking to buy what few assets are available.  Clearly a major difference is that this liquidity is equity driven, rather than debt driven, but the effect on pricing is much the same.

However increasingly I am starting to believe that this time it is very different.

If I recall correctly, back in the boom-time mania of 2006 everybody actually believed in what they were doing.  Those nice Candy boys genuinely believed that they could pay vastly more than anyone else for prime sites because they could add more value, Modus thought that the UK needed 35 additional non-prime town centre developments, Peter Cummings honestly believed that every tubby middle aged man he was introduced to was a property genius, Gordon thought that he had abolished boom and bust……

What is very different now is the level of open cynicism abounding in our industry.

No one seems to genuinely believe in the current bounce.  After a bottle of wine (or two) fund managers will admit that it is clearly quite embarrassing to be buying back assets at a premium of 20-30% over what they sold them for less than 12 months ago, despite rents falling; but they are paid to splash the cash.

One agent described doing deals with them “like clubbing baby seals”.

Other, allegedly more savvy, investors are buying on a momentum trade, knowing/hoping, that they are clever enough to get the hell out of Dodge before the next inevitable correction.

However, should there be a double dip, the Nuremberg defence of “I was only obeying orders” or if “I don’t do it someone else will”, will ring doubly hollow and as Warren Buffet would put it, we really will see some horrible sights/sites as the tide goes back out.