Against a backdrop of ongoing Brexit-related uncertainty, high inflation and low-wage growth, it’s been like this for well over a year. And looking forward, there’s no reason to think much the same narrative won’t carry on into 2018.

But on the residential development side – and many brokers will be seeing this first-hand – the market is quite the opposite of flat. In fact, it’s thriving. Weak supply is viewed as a major opportunity by developers of all sizes, who are more active than ever building the homes the country needs.

In short, while the demand side is slightly down, the supply side is on full steam ahead. Reflecting this, residential is currently making up almost two-thirds of the projects we are monitoring for a mixture of specialist, challenger and high street lenders.

London, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester are by a distance the UK’s development hotspots, as investors set out to meet the high demand for housing in these cities. And within these cities, permitted development rights, understandably, are the ticket of the day.

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Inflows of international capital have certainly contributed to the high level of residential development activity, in large part because of the weakness of sterling. But with the pound starting to strengthen given the messages emerging from Threadneedle Street, the development ‘discount’ may soon start to narrow.

Activity within the commercial property market has also been strong for some time, again driven by a mixture of domestic investors and their international counterparts, attracted by the weaker pound. Strangely, the market seems to have been almost unaffected by Brexit. 

London remains active, as always, but the hotspots are really every major city outside London. Student accommodation is the flavour of the day for many commercial property investors, with schemes cropping up in countless university towns and cities, from Glasgow and Durham to Leicester and Birmingham.

What we’re also seeing quite a lot of is transactional bank customers — generally light industrial firms that need warehousing, storage and manufacturing space — taking out loans and building their own premises rather than renting them.

One reason for this is that there’s simply not enough suitable property available to rent, the other is that it can be far cheaper to develop a purpose-built property via a commercial mortgage than rent longer term. You get the added bonus of the potential for capital growth, too. And that can never hurt.