Hey everyone, it's Rob B here with Rob D.

And if you are listening to this on the day it goes out on December 26, well, happy boxing day to you.

If you've celebrated Christmas or not, I hope you've had a wonderful festive period.

And I hope you aren't feeling too full and you haven't overindulged so much.

You are joining us on one of our shortest podcasts of the year and it's always slotted in this week between Christmas

and New Year. It's a time when we just reflect on 2024 for property for the world and a little

bit of our own personal reflections as well of how the year's gone.

Rob, let's start with property.

And this was not meant to be a good year for property.

All the predictions said it was going to be poor.

We're going to go backwards with house prices.

The market wasn't resilient.

Sentiment was low, and none of that

transpired to be true. No, we were talking about this recently and just saying it's really hard

to remember what sentiment was like a year ago, because however the world is now, we just kind

of assumed that it's always been that way, but a year ago, sentiment was really negative,

like really negative. It wasn't quite mini-budget

territory, but people were not feeling good about where the property market was going. But that

started to unravel pretty early in the year. And I think by March-ish, we could tell that

that's not how things were going to turn out. It's actually going to be a pretty normal year.

And I think that's what it turned out to be in the end for property. It wasn't an incredible year. It wasn't

a boom year. Nothing that unexpected happens is not like interest rates suddenly dropped back down

...