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Well-being for one and all!

Editorial
I’m probably not the first person to wish you this, but… Happy New Year! I hope you only meet good people and that both your personal and professional lives are successful. Maybe you don’t think this is possible? Well, just read this little story...

Some time ago, around 400 passengers boarded a flight from Helsinki to Paris, but the catering company, due to a mistake in processing the orders, had only prepared 200 in-flight meals. Just as the Airbus started hurtling down the runway, the cabin crew started to panic. Who was going to get fed? Maybe just the women and children or the elderly? Or perhaps straws should be drawn? But the senior stewardess had another idea and shortly afterwards the passengers were given the following message over the tannoy: “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to announce that due to some inexplicable mistake we have 400 passengers on board and only 200 meals. Whoever would be so kind as to give up their lunch for someone else, will receive free drinks from us until the end of the flight.” Much later, the same passengers heard another message: “Dear ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. If anyone is feeling hungry, please don’t hesitate to ask, because we still have 190 meals left to hand out.”

In Eurobuild’s first article of 2022, we take a look at whether the well-being trend in real estate has reached the core of the sector – in other words, the building site. We also take a short excursion beyond the region to the Netherlands, which undoubtedly is the world champion nation when it comes to implementing a circular economy. Do you want to know how to dismantle a large office building and then rebuild it somewhere else as if nothing had happened? Or how to keep cows on a floating farm in the middle of the largest port in Europe? Such things could only happen in the Netherlands. We’re also devoting a lot of space to the struggling large format retail sector. We examine how hypermarkets are coping in what are still difficult times and how they intend to use the vacated facilities left behind as a parting gift from Tesco. We’re also having a peek into student housing, but only to check what state it is in, both from the point of view of the student and of the shareholders in the funds that are eagerly adding them to their portfolios. Quick spoiler alert: neither the student nor the shareholder has much to complain about.

This is something I also wish you all at the start of the new year: no real worries, and if problems do arise, I hope they are only such dilemmas as whether to holiday in the Maldives or Zanzibar. Or maybe: should it be a Bentley or an Aston Martin?

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