It is a truism that it is difficult sometimes to know what is going to happen in the next five minutes, let alone next week, next year or at some distant point in the future.

If there is one certainty in this life — apart from Daniel Defoe’s death and taxes — it is that the future is uncertain, every minute of it; all we can do as participants in the great real estate investment game of making returns for our clients, and they for their clients, is arm ourselves with the knowledge to help us do our best and act accordingly. Much time, money and effort is expended on research designed to inform us better. We take what we are offered and sent, digest and analyse it, and decide. We find out later whether that decision was correct.

A crystal-ball exercise in the political, economic and real estate investment environment that we have now is even more fraught than normal. We know what we have — a new US president, Brexit, low developed-nation economic growth, higher