Trump’s single-family ban is an open goal for the UK property market

This signals two major opportunities for the UK market, the first being the clear appetite of American institutions for large-scale single-family home investments, and the second being the huge potential for American dollars to flow into the UK.

We don’t even need to take all of it. At the current size of both markets, even a 2% shift into the UK market would almost double its value. Start scaling that to a 5-20% shift and it changes the UK market completely, not to mention going a long way in solving a chronic undersupply of housing.

A shift like this wouldn’t just mean the delivery of much-needed homes across the UK, it would also mean job creation, regeneration, more public service, and all of the subsequent benefits to suburban areas that have previously been overlooked while the investment has been going straight to city centres.

The property markets in the UK and US also share hallmark similarities that would make the transition of deploying capital from one market to another easy to manage.

I have talked at length about the squeeze on middle-income earners being one of the driving factors behind the single-family home market, and the same is apparent in the US. The customer life cycle, culture and ways of living are almost indistinguishable, if not a mirror image, of the UK market.

Let’s be clear – those dollars are going to go somewhere else, and the UK doesn’t just present a great opportunity for those institutions to capitalise, but there is an existing precedent in the market that will give American institutions comfort.

Blackstone, Pinebridge, TPG, Kennedy Wilson and CPP have all entered the UK market over the last five years, with Goldman Sachs providing funding to a number of sites – these are just some of the examples that add strength to the argument that the UK is an obvious choice for these American institutions looking abroad.

Ged McPartlin, former managing director, Ascend Properties and single-family specialist