By Alistair McIntosh, HQN CEO.

My old friend Colin Wiles has penned a blistering barnstorming blog about Sage. You’ll enjoy it and you’ll agree with it. He’s only saying what most of us think. What’s the world coming to if a housing boss trousers a cool £million a year? While we’re all foaming at the mouth with rage, we do need to look at the bigger picture here.

From scratch, out of nothing, Blackstone, who own Sage, created a housing association that’ll soon have more than 20,000 homes. That’s a big deal.

Years ago, the Nationwide tried to do much the same through its Quality Street brand. It got nowhere, despite bringing in the best brains from the Corporation of Glasgow (now the Wheatley Group) and Paddington Churches (now Notting Hill Genesis). They roped me in, but I was more of a hindrance than a help.

Firstly, I smashed the tastefully liveried Mercedes G Wagen to smithereens and, for my next trick, I did a cataclysmically dire property deal.

Yes, I snapped up a smart new cobbled mews near Kings Cross for letting but no one wanted it, save for the visiting Russian chess team who stayed only a week. If you want a masterclass on losing money, feel free to get in touch. All in all, when I was with Quality Street I did more to destroy capitalism than when I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party!

So, Sage did something I couldn’t do and you won’t get any sour grapes from me.

The shrewd among you will notice Sage is part of a wider trend. Buyers from the US are targeting what they see as undervalued British companies. The main targets are supermarket chains and defence firms. A relation was with Ultra, a company specialising in defence systems, in West London for years.

Part of the deal was that you could buy shares at a discount; so, of course, she took advantage of that. It was a way of providing a steady income and rainy day savings for her children. Due to the bid from the US, these shares have soared in value. But no one really wants the money – we’d rather Ultra kept doing the nation proud as it is.

If Blackstone see value in the UK affordable housing market, they’ll put more money in, and others will follow. What does that mean for our social landlords?

New entrants in any business have advantages. Mainly, they don’t have to manage the legacy. So, they won’t have such big catchup repair bills and ITV won’t have them on speed dial. Sage has moved quickly; can you be as fleet of foot?

Shortly, we’ll be publishing the blogs sent to us by young leaders. They’ve noticed the huge strides made by the likes of Amazon and Deliveroo during lockdown. So, they see the advantages of scale. But they’re well aware of the recent mistakes from our larger landlords.

That’s got them thinking of creative ways of blending the muscularity of our big landlords with the sensitivity of local players. They may be onto something.

To save our sector, we’ve got to move faster than private equity. Is that possible? Is our spate of mergers a strategic response to a live threat, or marriages of convenience? We better get this right, as we’ll miss housing associations if they go.

Finally, what do I think of the million pound man? The top team at Sage keep changing so there’s very little job security. Yes, the salaries are eye-wateringly high, but you won’t get them for long.

It’s still a much better bet to stay with a housing association when you consider tenure and the pension. Time to quell the inner green-eyed monster!