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BRIXTON SINGS THE BOB DYLAN BLUES

Brixton's shares have been left blowin' in the wind

Wednesday August 20,2008

By Andrew Johnson

PROPERTY company Brixton used Bob Dylan and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse yesterday to sum up the crisis facing the industry.

Chief executive Tim Wheeler used a picture of the horsemen to open his City presentation and then quoted from Dylan’s hit All Along The Watchtower to “tell it like it is”.

The group saw pre-tax profits of £192million turn to a loss of £237million for the first half to June. The shares fell 23p to 224.75p.

In a stock market statement, Wheeler said Dylan’s “apocalyptic lines captured the mindset of the commercial real estate market”.

Among the song’s lyrics are: “There must be some way out of here/ Said the joker to the thief/ There is too much confusion/ I can’t get no relief/ Businessmen they drink my wine/ Ploughmen dig my earth/ None of them along the line/Know what any of it is worth.”

Wheeler said the main problem with the market was that nobody knew the worth of anything because there was so little property changing hands.

He said there was no way out of the problem until asking prices fell far enough to entice buyers back into the market.

It was the biggest crisis since the early 1990s, he said, adding: “There is confusion — and an element of denial — over direct property pricing due to a lack of transactions.”

Brixton owns 19 million square feet in more than 1,300 properties, mostly warehouses and business parks and mainly
concentrated in south-east England.

It has seen the book value of its properties fall 17.8 per cent from last year. Its portfolio is now worth 448p a share, compared with 545p a share a year ago.

Cazenove analysts warned that the shares did not look good value, with the losses bigger than its forecasts. The sector was still facing many uncertainties, they said.

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