Center Parcs debacle

Brookfield Property Partners is getting quite a bit of adverse publicity today here in the UK.

It owns Center Parcs, a group of upmarket holiday resort villages. Next Monday, Center Parcs is kicking all of its guests out of its holiday villages for 24 hours from 10am local time.

Their justification for doing this is because of the Queens Funeral (11am on Monday). They have told guests to stay somewhere else that night.

Not a good way to treat your customers. Needless to say customers are complaining and it has been picked up by the national media.

Brookfield isn’t well known over here in the UK, to put it mildly. It’s becoming much better known now. Center Parcs is giving us another example that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

Guests in middle of holiday will have to spend night elsewhere or go home early

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/13/center-parcs…

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Not a good way to treat your customers. Needless to say customers are complaining and it has been picked up by the national media.

Yes, a brain freeze moment for this sub of a sub, reversed following the blowback:

The company has now changed its decision, saying that it will no longer require guests who are not due to depart on Monday to leave.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62893476

Apparently, the last-minute holiday has triggered a fair amount of grousing across the board:

LONDON — The British government’s decision to declare Monday, Sept. 19, a public holiday for Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral has led to a wave of closures, service disruptions and cancellations, including in essential industries such as transport and health care, and sparked a backlash among those with long-standing plans and appointments that day.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/queen-elizab…

In the larger scheme of things, it is perhaps not the most significant recent development for Brookfield investors. That distinction would probably go to the rapidly scaling “insurance solutions” business, where it has in mind embedding alternative asset income streams into books that fixed income streams once supported. At the parent company’s investor day in New York this week, it identified insurance as one of its three “pillars” of growth over the next five years, along with asset management and its own capital investments. It is projecting 17% CAGR over that span for investors who hold both the original shares and the shares to be spun out for the asset management business later this year. As they wrote in the Q2 shareholder letter:

The goal of Insurance is to create one of the leading platforms for Insurance Solutions globally. It is expected that
the capital base of this business will be vastly greater in the future, achieved through internal growth as well as
through the addition of new capital from the Corporation and other business partners. Insurance is expected to
become a significant global operating business for overall Brookfield, while continuing as a paired share with
Brookfield Corporation for the foreseeable future.

The presentation slides are available on the website; presumably the video will be posted after the subs do their song and dance in Toronto later this month.

https://bam.brookfield.com/sites/brookfield-ir/files/2022-09…

They are requesting the ticker BN for the new parent, Brookfield Corp. I’m guessing they will retain BAM for the spinout.

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