Photo: Pixabay/PublicDomainPictures
By Mike Phillips | Bisnow
The British royal family and real estate are inextricably intertwined. Much of its wealth and income is derived from land and property — with a lineage tracing back more than 1,000 years, the monarchy has had time to build up quite the portfolio.
In honour of the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey (left), Bisnow has compiled some of its best reporting from recent years on the sometimes strange, always arcane and usually very profitable ways in which the Crown and the royal family get involved in the sector.
There is Charles himself, who as Prince was an exponent of sustainability and placemaking from the late 1990s on, espousing values that real estate is now embracing. But his views on architecture and design have often caused controversy, and like many property professionals, he launched a fund during the last boom that hit the skids during the Global Financial Crisis.
Then there is the Crown Estate, a property company like perhaps no other in the world, which owns more than £15B of assets that are hereditary possessions of the Sovereign, held “in right of the Crown”, where the profits go to the British state. It owns everything from London offices and retail to the British seabed, and, for a 1,000-year-old estate, is at the forefront in areas like renewable energy and sustainability.
As well as that, and more controversially, the family owns huge swathes of UK land and property privately, from which it derives tens of millions of pounds of income. Whether one family should be able to retain such estates in perpetuity is an open question.
