Hugh Hendry: Buy German houses

Legendary investor Hugh Hendry sees plenty of upside for the German property market.

Andrew Van Sickle
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published
in News

Hugh Hendry's Eclectica fund famously made 31% in 2008, a year that saw US stocks slump by almost 40% as the global credit crunch kicked in. Hendry was also right to say deflation, rather than inflation, would be a key theme in the post-credit-crunch era, and last year raised eyebrows again with a well-timed bet on the dollar. This helped the Eclectica fund gain 28% in the year to June 2015.Now Hendry is eyeing opportunities in Europe.

European monetary policy now suits the troubled periphery, but it is too loose for Germany, he says. And that bodes well for the German housing market. Property isbenefiting from a demographic tailwind, he notes. The population is moving from the east and the countryside to cities and the more populated areas of west Germany. Vacancy rates are low in these areas and "the pressure on the housing stock means prices are finally rising from a low base".

The authorities have exacerbated shortages using "the time-honoured imbecilic policy of rent caps for existing tenants". The upshot is that the next two years are likely to see "another leg higher" for German property, and property stocks offer potential upside of more than 30%.Advertisement

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Andrew Van Sickle
Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.

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