Blackstone, Bueller, Badenoch and Burnham

Today may be the first full working day for our new prime minister, but he needs to hit the ground running. By September’s party conference, Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period will be over.

Ferris Bueller never quite said “life comes at you pretty fast”, though we all knew what Kemi Badenoch meant when she used the line at Kier Starmer’s final PMQs.

Lying on his bed, Bueller looks down the camera lens and says: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." He smiles, and Yello’s infectious “Oh yeah” kicks in.

We tend to misremember Bueller’s first line – perhaps unsurprisingly considering it’s been 40 years (40!) since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off premiered. And we tend to forget his second altogether. But thinking back to the first RE:UK conference reminded me of its wisdom.

No one would accuse Blackstone of failing to stop and look around once in a while. So it’s worth noting what James Seppala, Blackstone’s head of real estate for Europe, had to say to Vanessa Hale on stage at Together’s fabulous new space in the City.

First and foremost, Seppala was positive, “about as positive as we have been for years”.

Secondly, he was upbeat on the UK too: “London is the truly global city in Europe”.

And thirdly he had conviction about real assets too: “When we look at the fundamentals across our industry, we feel pretty good.”

As significantly, all this was grounded in both the current reality (“we’re seeing the effect of nobody building anything”) and despite it – what he called “the harrowing environment”.

I’ll come back to sectors. But Seppala was bullish on AI too. It’s helping Blackstone “make better, faster decisions”. Note it’s not impacting how the business thinks about recruitment, as it’s cutting out the fairly “senseless tasks” that occupied the time of Seppala and his peers when they were starting out. “I suppose I learned something out of [those],” he said. “Could I have learned more quickly? Sure.”

So what are the sectors that Blackstone favours right now? No great surprises, but it’s worth playing them back:

·       Digital infrastructure and data centres

·       Logistics

·       Hospitality and lodging

·       Living (with some nuance)

Or to paraphrase and to differently misquote Ferris Bueller, life may move pretty fast, so stop, look around and respond. Oh yeah.