Housebuilders partied like it was '89. And now the pain is like '91

Housebuilders ploughed on with their growth plans at the top of the market and now they're paying the price, finds Mark Leftly Sunday, 6 July 2008 Once again, Tony Pidgley, the Barnardo's boy turned multimillionaire residential builder, is set to make a killing out of a property downturn. While his peers at Barratt and Taylor Wimpey were getting ready to announce mass redundancies and desperately trying to shore up their balance sheets in the worst housing crisis since the early 1990s, the 60-year-old chief executive of Berkeley announced two weeks ago that the company would spend £350m on cheap land. Berkeley board members had noted a 25 per cent fall in land prices, so decided to go buying in a move that in effect calls the bottom of the market. Pidgley made the same call in 1991, making him something of a legend in the... [read full story]