Mr Rashford's Property Portfolio

 From the Daily Mail

Campaigning football star Marcus Rashford has bought five luxury homes worth at least £2 million, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The striker, 23, has ploughed an estimated £1.5 million into three houses on a new estate in Wilmslow, Cheshire, as well as buying a house and flat in Macclesfield.

I could get into how awful it is that a productive footballer and nice guy, becomes a parasitic landlord, but he probably hasn’t thought too much about that. But, I think this is a bad investment.

Our host has explained a few times about the relationship of commuting time and rents, that the closer you are to the office, the more your rent rises, and that particularly applies to Wilmslow.

I know Wilmslow quite well. I spent a few months working in Wythenshawe, which is like Syria on a bad day, so I chose to stay in Wilmslow. It’s also not far from Manchester Airport and a 20 minute rail commute from Manchester Piccadilly, the main rail station.

If you compare the prices in Wilmslow and Congleton, it’s around £450K for a 3 bed semi vs £300K in Congleton. Congleton is 50 minutes from Manchester by train.

But the value of being 30 minutes closer to the office is going to diminish if you’re only doing it 2 days a week rather than 5. Instead of there being a £150K difference over Congleton to someone doing that, it’s more like a 60K difference. OK, not everyone is going to be doing this post-Covid, but most of those people are office workers in the centre of Manchester and the effect is going to be big there.

This is why London rents have fallen anything from 3% to 7% on a year ago (depending on who you ask) while other rents have risen. If you aren’t going into the office, or not that often, you don’t need to be in Hammersmith, you can be in Slough, or Swindon.

I think the whole of this is going to take time to work out. Much of it will come as people move. Home owners near to the centre of cities are going to think this is a short-term blip or gully, and hold out, not selling as the prices continue to fall rather than bailing out.