A farewell and introductions... plus RESI and REITs

Rob Mackinlay

Hello! I am Rob Mackinlay the new finance editor  at Social Housing. I come from a financial journalism background and my job will be to maintain the standard of the magazine’s news content while Rob Cowley edits the data content.

Kate Allen, who edited Social Housing Magazine for 5 years, has left for the FT where she writes for the data blog and contributes to many of the property related stories in the paper’s main pages.

Another change for readers is that the Social Housing magazine website now has a paywall which means subscribers will have immediate access to content. In the past readers could only see what was in the magazine by looking at a hard copy and three months later the content would be republished online for all to see, not just subscribers.

No more. All of the website’s content is now behind a paywall.

This blog, however, will remain free-to-air and will be used to highlight some of the stories and data available to subscribers on the site. In addition we now have 740 followers on Twitter (@housingmagazine) who can be directed to the blog for more details and space for discussion.

The aim is to produce regular blog posts and to coordinate with Twitter. Tomorrow at the RESI conference we'll cover as many of the seminars as we can and tweet some of the highlights.

We noted that the programme has been updated: the original agenda included a discussion called ‘Residential REITs update’ but that has become ‘New financial models update’ but with the same panel of speakers.

Earlier this month Phil Shanks at SAF Housing wrote a piece in which he said he had received 'no support whatsoever' from civil servants for his REIT project despite politicians appearing to be supportive.

It will be interesting to see whether the new broader title will still include a REITs update of some kind. In our September issue Adrian Jolliffe covered some of the issues.