Real estate

‘This is where people with staggering wealth end up’: who will buy Britain’s most expensive house? thumbnail

‘This is where people with staggering wealth end up’: who will buy Britain’s most expensive house?

April 8, 2023

Twice a day for the past 12 years, Markus Roggen, an artist and fashion consultant, has walked past the house at the end of his road and wondered to himself: “Why is it still empty?” Roggen’s road is no ordinary road, and the house on the corner is no ordinary house. It is a 45-room […]

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20 offices turned into 2,000 individual pods for post-Covid working thumbnail

20 offices turned into 2,000 individual pods for post-Covid working

August 13, 2020

Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube. Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work […]

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London high-rise offices to suffer 'dramatic' dent in demand, say experts thumbnail

London high-rise offices to suffer ‘dramatic’ dent in demand, say experts

June 23, 2020

Demand for office space in City skyscrapers will be diminished even after the coronavirus pandemic is over, with experts predicting a major shift in the commercial property market. As large proportions of office workers continue to work from home and physical distancing rules mean people will be unable to cram into lifts to access higher-level […]

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Former Tory donor's housing project 'unlawfully approved to avoid £40m hit' thumbnail

Former Tory donor’s housing project ‘unlawfully approved to avoid £40m hit’

May 27, 2020

Ministry denies claims of bias in approval of Richard Desmond’s development one day before levy kicked in Westferry printworks proposed development. Photograph: PR The housing secretary knew that a billionaire former media tycoon had only 24 hours to have an east London property development approved before community charges were imposed that would have cost him […]

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