A lot has changed in five years. Since launching React News in June 2019, we’ve had a global pandemic, wars, recession, spiralling interest rates, Brexit, a change of monarch and four prime ministers.
In that time, we’ve produced 32,000 articles, including nearly 10,000 pieces of proprietary content – everything from breaking news and analysis to big-name interviews and opinion pieces. We’ve gone from a team of three reporters to 24 full-time journalists, operating from various locations in the UK, Germany, France and the Philippines.
Allow us to rewind to the very beginning, to those heady prelaunch days of 2018, when Chris Borland, David Hatcher, James Buckley and Jamie Hamer came together with an idea to shake things up.
“Why do we need another property news service?”
When canvassing the market before launch, our grand plan was met with a healthy dose of skepticism. “Why do we need yet another real estate news service?” was the most common question. It was a fair point. There were, and still are, a number of more established titles that serve the property industry.
Nevertheless, we felt there was a gap in the market for a news-led, best-in-class service and set ourselves the goal of becoming the go-to publication for breaking news and heavyweight analysis for the commercial real estate sector.
But good ideas are nothing without the investment to back them up. Enter Richard Croft, then chief executive of M7 who, one fateful, lederhosen-clad evening in one of the vast Oktoberfest beer halls in October 2018, agreed to provide us with the investment needed to get our venture up and running.
Four men and a PDF
By April 2019, Croft – along with the other directors of M7 – finalised the deal to acquire a minority stake in React News. A move which, given we were at that time little more than four men and a PDF presentation, showed tremendous faith.
We officially launched React News on 17 June 2019. Having promised the market all the hard-hitting news first, we spectacularly underdelivered on day one. Our first bulletin, primed to go out at 8.30am, was hit by a technical glitch. We took the decision to simply kick-off with our now notorious Afternoon Alert. Thankfully, it was an isolated incident.
Despite the gremlins, we went into day one with momentum behind us. We had been telling anyone who’d listen about our venture for months and, before we’d even published our first article, had signed up 12 subscribing companies – including some of the biggest property companies.
M7 aside, the first company to verbally agree to subscribe was Crosstree. Blurry-eyed and questioning his life decisions one morning on Curzon Street, David almost literally bumped into a jolly and pepped Nick Lyle, who had heard on the grapevine we were starting something and insisted on having a contract sent over.
The first to actually put pen to paper though was Segro, Europe’s largest listed real estate company, which after a rough and ready pitch meeting agreed to subscribe then and there. And yes, the logistics market was booming back then.
That momentum continued apace and left our then one-man commercial team struggling to service the deluge of inbound leads coming in from would-be subscribers. It started to feel like we were maybe on to something.
We were loud and aggressive in those days. We were bombarding people’s inboxes, smoking the phones, noisy on social media and pounding the streets to get in front of as many people as we could. It’s not to say we don’t value new subscribers now – of course we do. But back then those new subscribers really mattered, as each one we signed up effectively meant we could stay solvent for another month.
In November 2019 we made our first editorial hire – Charlie Schouten. We ideally would have delayed any recruitment until the business was more established. But, unbelievably, Charlie approached us wanting to join this little-known start-up. And you don’t pass up an opportunity like that when it comes knocking.
Charlie came with a reputation for being the go-to property reporter in the North of England, and has bossed that market for us ever since. The reputation React has in the North is almost entirely thanks to him.
The ability to serve up tailored, customisable content was one of the important differentiators we wanted React to have early on. All new subscribers were asked to tick their preferences when logging on for the first time. That informed our decision to create geography and sector-specific bulletins based on user interests.
A weekly Ireland bulletin came first, quickly followed by a logistics bulletin, for those interested in the then red-hot sector. Targeted newsletters for London, the North, residential, Germany and France came next.
It was all going so well – almost too well – when, in March 2020, Covid-19 hit. We’d been trading for nine months and, like many other companies, found ourselves staring into a very uncertain future.
We can remember at least a dozen big firms who, prior to the first UK lockdown, were about to sign up to React, only to pull the plug as the pandemic took hold.
Thankfully that period was short-lived. Aside from being deeply insensitive to think of it in these terms, we’ll never really know if Covid helped or hindered our business. Without access to the usual water-cooler chat that happens in an office, we quickly found that React News had a vital role to play when the industry’s access to information by other means was cut off.
Not wishing to undersell it, until that point React had developed a reputation for down-and-dirty news reporting. David, James, Chris and Charlie were (and are) unashamed news junkies. But given the complex and uncertain macroeconomic environment we suddenly found ourselves in, the need for more heavyweight analysis became apparent.
The acceptable face of React News
Luckily, in May 2020, we hired Guy Montague-Jones – the “acceptable face of React News” – who agreed to join as analysis editor to provide just that. Having spent nearly six years at Property Week, latterly as deputy editor, he set about producing the kind of incisive, in-depth content we sorely needed.
Having promised the market nothing but seasoned real estate reporters at React, we continued to deliver. Another Covid-era recruit, Jessica Middleton-Pugh, was given the daunting task of covering two of the sector’s biggest markets: residential and retail – and has been dominating those patches ever since.
React News started primarily as a UK-focused service, with the occasional big European scoop thrown in for good measure. Consistent pre-launch feedback suggested we should take European coverage just as seriously. There were, after all, strong UK and European news services out there but none that were doing both really well. What if React News could be a one-stop shop in that regard?
Enter Julie Cruz, who joined us in October 2020 as Europe editor. Having been managing editor for Real Estate Fund Intelligence, off the back of a seven-year stint at Bloomberg, Julie had the chops to recreate for Europe what we were doing in the UK.
At that point we were producing two UK email bulletins a day. Within a week of joining, Julie sent out our first Europe bulletin and almost exactly two years later, in October 2022, that increased to twice daily.
November 2020 heralded the launch of The Sunday Times’ associate editor Oliver Shah’s weekly column for React. Already a well-known property commentator following his earlier years as real estate journo for the newspaper, and the subsequent notoriety that accompanied the publication of his Philip Green exposé Damaged Goods, we knew he would be a popular, if sometimes controversial, voice for React.
Also towards the end of 2020 came the launch of our Deal Tracker app, a powerful tool for benchmarking deals, researching transactions and identifying market trends.
React becomes Europe’s most-read property news service
A major landmark followed in February 2021, when we officially became Europe’s most-read paid-for real estate news service. The number to beat was 17,000 subscribers; today we are at more than double that.
February 2021 was also when Green Street, having first approached us four months earlier, acquired React News, buying out the founders and our minority investors. We’d only been going 18 months from inception to sale – far quicker than any of us had anticipated. But the acquisition enabled us to scale the business even faster and start to look at expanding, not just within Europe, but beyond it.
With an ever-growing team, the ability of React’s founders and editorial directors – Chris, David and James – to continue to function as “player managers” became unsustainable. Therefore, in December 2022, the day-to-day running of the newsroom was handed to Guy, who was promoted to managing editor for the UK, and Julie, promoted to managing editor for Europe.
Since Green Street’s purchase of React News, subscribers have been enjoying uninterrupted access and, on the surface, not much has changed. But later this month React News will rebrand to Green Street News. You’ll notice a new look but don’t worry – it’s still the same market-leading content.
The move is designed to coincide with another milestone – the impending launch of our news service in Canada.
And if you think our quest for global expansion ends there, think again.
The React News team would like to thank everyone who has supported us, in the beginning, today and in the future. Your help, guidance, feedback and backing means more to us than you can ever imagine.
Here’s to the next five years…
