Property's Fast-Fashion Problem

How can property match consumer brands when the property cycle is much longer?

Consumer-brand thinking does not mean making property faster or more trend-led. It means understanding the difference between a durable proposition and its temporary expression. Products evolve. Campaigns change. Cultural tastes move. But underneath them sits a much more consistent understanding of who the brand is for, what it represents, why somebody should choose it and why somebody would want to be associated with it.

Fashion is what changes. Brand is what allows you to change without losing who you are.

Ironically, the property industry, especially CRE, already largely behaves like fast fashion. So many assets are designed around current market assumptions and an architecture that is already fashionable at the time, so the risk is that these assets may well be démodé before the building reaches practical completion and is brought to market for leasing. In fact, I may not be too early in compiling the Manufacturing Taste Guide to Retrofitting 2030, because so much of what's being launched to the market in 2026 already looks dated before the ink on the CGI has dried.

Asset positioning is far more than market segmentation, asset class and performance metrics like EPC ratings. Positioning is also about how an asset is perceived, valued and chosen by the market.

When positioning only goes as far as these parameters, many of the decisions that actually shape perception - architecture, amenities, experience, cultural associations and narrative - are left without a sufficiently strong proposition to organise them, so differentiation is delegated to shortcuts that emulate what the market already offers when it may well be at the peak of its trendiness.

Today's successful buildings become tomorrow's benchmarks. Tomorrow's buildings inherit today's amenities, aesthetics and assumptions.

And a long development cycle only magnifies the problem.

So the irony is that for development to match consumer-brand thinking, it needs to be less dependent on fashion.