Tony Pidgley, the £28m-a-year chairman of housebuilder Berkeley Group, is used to riding the ups and downs. The former Barnardo’s boy once lived in a disused train carriage.
So it is no surprise that the 71-year-old sees the slowdown in London’s property market as an opportunity. Berkeley has quietly been buying up slices of prime real estate at a discount to be ready for a market recovery.
Investors would do well to believe in Pidgley. Since founding Berkeley in 1976, he has earned a reputation for calling property cycles correctly — liquidating assets before the late-1980s housing crash, shifting resources into the centre of London in the 1990s, then pulling back from volume housebuilding before the 2008 financial crisis.
However, Berkeley shares have been on