Nicola Livingstone

Emerging implications of online retailing for real estate: Twenty-first century clicks and bricks

Purpose – This paper aims to initially explore the effects of online retailing on corporate real estate strategies today, examining current trends and the approaches of leading edge retailers in this evolving marketplace. The UK has the greatest proportion of online sales worldwide. Design/methodology/approach – Context is provided through existing literature, and the methodology considers specific case studies. Information from financial reports, websites and evidence directly from retailers is derived to examine selected sectoral responses (food shopping, fashion retailing and department stores) to online shopping. The research considers the interface between the virtual and physical retail landscapes. Findings – The Internet is undeniably driving change, and large retailers have responded by embracing multi-channel sales strategies in which the adapted physical store remains a central element. Research limitations/implications – The case studies are arguably limited in their market assessment by examin...

The Hunger Games: Food poverty and politics in the UK

This ‘Behind the News’ intervention offers a critique of food aid provision in the UK through two distinct and yet interconnected perspectives. First, it situates the crisis of food poverty within a wider social and historic context, and second, it questions the position and response of the capitalist state to this growing crisis. The piece weaves the two perspectives together, reflecting on the current government’s struggle to recognise, accept or address the significance of this crisis.

Faculty and Undergraduate Student Perceptions of an Integrated Mentoring Approach.

The role of an academic mentor is typically diverse, discipline specific and institutionally heterogeneous. Mentoring relationships are commonplace, yet the experience and delivery of mentoring in universities reflect a broad spectrum of approaches and execution. This article reflects on the pedagogic evolution of mentoring, examining the student response to systematic changes in undergraduate mentoring. Much has been written on mentoring, but this research focuses on student experiences when pastoral, professional and curriculum-based mentoring models are integrated and applied together, rather than adopted as separate, distinct approaches. The research employs a mixed methodology, adopting qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques to investigate how mentoring relationships evolved following the implementation of an updated contemporary mentoring system. Initially, faculty responses to the changing mentoring system were related through semi-structured interviews. Student experiences were then collected in a pilot study via questionnaires disseminated across all undergraduate levels and subsequently analysed. Key findings suggest that by adopting multifaceted approaches to mentoring which blend the modern and traditional, institutions can effectively add significant ‘value’ to the student experience. Typically (but not exclusively), the undergraduate students’ personal and academic development is enhanced when a system which integrates the pastoral, professional and curriculum-based models is applied.

Land-Use Continuity: Farmland and Old Wineries

This chapter explores cases of rural land investment that deliver continuity in land-use but bring new motives and practices to established rural activities. These cases include the following: (1) the acquisition of the Sella & Mosca Winery in Sardinia, first by Campari in the 2000s and more recently by Holding Terra Moretti. (2) Investment in United Kingdom farming by the industrial entrepreneur James Dyson, through his Beeswax Company. (3) The consolidation of horticultural activity in Almeria, Spain, by larger local and international operators. (4) The Wellcome Trust’s investment in UK farming in support of its medical research goals. (5) The use of investment funds to support ‘leaseback’ farming operations in Eastern Europe.

The Changing Nature of Investment in Rural Assets

Themes explored in this chapter include rural land investment, acquisition and consolidation. The chapter addresses five questions. First, what have been the recent patterns of rural land acquisition and consolidation, particularly those driven by new investors? Second, what approaches characterise investment, passive and indirect or active and direct? Third, who are the investors in rural land? Fourth, what are the motives behind investment in rural land assets? Fifth, and finally, how do investment motives and strategies link to emerging place-based impacts? The big question tackled here is who is investing in rural land assets and for what reason. The chapter flags the profit-seeking nature of land investment (and financialisation) alongside personal motivations.

Assessing the Impacts of Investment

The propensity of investors and investment to impact, for good or bad, on local economies, environments and on communities will depend, to a large extent, on the transformations in land-use and economic activity that those investments bring, as well as the extent to which local assets are engaged in new, locally embedded activities. This chapter has four aims: first, to scope the sorts of impacts that are examined in the case studies; second, to review the ways in which different impacts might be conceived and measured; third, to outline the framework for assessing investment impacts adopted in this research; and fourth, to explain how the gathered data for this study were interpreted.

Land-Use Transformations: Leisure, Bio-energy and New Wineries

The cases presented in this chapter examine investments that have underpinned transformative change in their respective rural economies and landscapes, beginning with Donald Trump’s investment in the Menie Estate, Scotland, and his project to deliver a world-ranking golf resort on one of Scotland’s most sensitive and important coastlines is considered. The second case study is an examination of the creation and operation of Moominworld in Naantali, Finland. Three further studies then track the growth of the biogas industry in Northern Ireland and its potential to raise and stabilise farm incomes, the development of the wine industry in southern England with investment from continental wine producers and, finally, the cultivation of willow in Finland for the production of biochar, used in soil improvement and water purification.

The ‘online high street’ or the high street online? The implications for the urban retail hierarchy

Abstract The U.K. has the greatest proportion of online sales in Europe. This study seeks to explore the differential effects of online retailing on the (evolving) hierarchy of shopping centres by examining current trends and underlying forces. The overall objectives of the paper are to qualify and explore the influence of online retailing in the decision-making processes of leading retailers today; and to assess how virtual influences become manifest in the tangible built environment and have impacted the retail hierarchy? It differentiates online retail trends by sector and retailer size, and examines the consequences for different types of shopping centres. The empirical research is based on the changing location of stores of a major fashion retailer and interviews with three of Britain’s leading retailers that have seen the more substantial increase in online turnover in recent years. Major retailers are found to have integrated online offerings, such as click and collect, into a ‘multi-channel’ retailing approach. Online retailing has therefore become an inherent and central element within large retailers’ business and therefore real estate strategies, with considerations such as online marketplace penetration and possible ‘cannibalisation’ coming to the fore in decision-making about store location. Online retail sales are, to a degree, drawing sales away from shopping centres but its impact on the existing shopping hierarchy is largely to reinforce established long-term trends driven by the motor age and the shift to out of town retailing. This is symbolised by the largest ‘high street’ fashion retailer now having more branches in retail parks than town centres. Out of town shopping centres for example are benefitting because of the ease of goods collection offered by these locations.

Revisiting currency swaps: hedging real estate investments in global city markets

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-examine currency swaps as an effective hedging technique for individual asset performance in today’s global real estate market, by considering hypothetical prime office investments across six different cities and five currency pairs. The perspective of a risk-averse, high net worth, non-institutional, smaller-scale Swiss investor is paired with investors from five additional national markets. Design/methodology/approach The study examines currency swaps in key office markets across three continents (Frankfurt, London, New York, Sydney, Warsaw and Zurich) and extends previous work on the topic by adopting both Monte Carlo (MC) and Latin Hypercube (LH) techniques to create stochastic samples for individual asset performance analyses. This is the first paper to apply LH sampling to currency swaps with underlying real estate assets, and the validity of this method is compared with that of MC. Four models are presented: the experience of the domestic investor (no exchange rate (ER) fluctuations); an unhedged direct foreign investment; hedging rental income and initial purchase price via a currency swap; and hedging rental income and anticipated terminal value. Findings The efficacy of a swap depends on the historical framework of the ERs. If the foreign currency depreciates against the domestic one, hedging the repatriated cash flow of a property investment proved superior to the unhedged strategy (EUR, GBP, PLN and USD to the CHF). An investor would benefit from exposure to an appreciating foreign currency (CHF to the EUR, GBP, PLN and USD), with an unhedged strategy clearly outperforming the currency swap as well as the domestic investor’s performance, while a historically sideways fluctuating ER (AUD to the CHF) also favours an unhedged approach. In all scenarios, unexpected economic or market shocks could cause negative consequences on the repatriated proceeds. Practical implications This research is of interest to small-scale, non-institutional investors aiming to develop strategies for currency risk mitigation in international investments for individual assets; however, tax-optimising strategies and the implications on a larger portfolio have not been taken into account. Originality/value There is no recent academic work on the efficacy of currency swaps in today’s global office market, nor has the position of smaller-scale high net worth investors received much academic attention. This research revisits the discussion on their validity, providing contemporary insight into the performance of six markets using LH as an alternative and original sampling technique.

Slow Cities, Urban Politics and the Temporalities of Planning: Lessons from London

In the wake of the global financial crash of 2007–2008, many governments have sought to streamline their post-war planning systems and encourage faster project delivery. Expedited decision-making is equated with efficiency and the meeting of broader growth objectives, whereas slower and more complex forms of engagement are presented as an impediment and a governmental problem to be solved through reform. For critical authors such as Weber, such approaches are fraught with danger. The core objective of planning systems should, conversely, be focused on the production of ‘slow cities’, in which decision-making times allow time for proper democratic and judicial-technical oversight of development processes. Slow planning, it is claimed, can limit the negative impacts of rapid development on urban built environments and communities. In this paper, we draw on research in London to examine the relationships between the temporalities of planning, project outcomes and the politics of time. We argue that within urban studies there needs to be a stronger emphasis on the temporal dimensions of governance and the politics of time. We highlight the conditions in and through which temporal resources are deployed strategically in urban planning and assess the ways in which powerful, reflexive and time-resourced developers and investors use planning timeframes to boost returns over the longer term. We conclude by setting out agendas for future research and for more variegated and contextualised explorations of fast and slow planning processes.