Insights

The built environment’s workforce needs are becoming increasingly complex. This edition of Wednesday Market Insights explores the Map the Gap campaign, the growing importance of sustainability capability across the development lifecycle, and the evolving talent requirements of the later living sector.

Major land acquisitions are signalling renewed confidence across the residential development sector. Discover why developers are recruiting strategically before the market fully recovers, the skills in demand, and what Cobalt's Development Index reveals about the future of hiring.

A weekly round-up of the hiring trends shaping the built environment. This edition explores how regeneration hiring is becoming part of project strategy and why interim construction leadership is increasingly used to protect project delivery.

Cobalt's read on the UK's leading real estate investment and infrastructure forum, from our team on the ground in Leeds across all three days.

Diversity in the property sector is improving, with gender pay gaps narrowing and greater transparency emerging. However, representation at senior levels, psychological safety and inclusive leadership remain critical to achieving lasting progress across real estate and construction.

Wednesday Market Insights from Cobalt, Edition 1 UKREiiF Review: Realistic, not Optimistic what UKREiiF 2026 actually said.

Construction News' April long read on the new Construction Skills Mission Board marks a quiet but important shift in how the sector's skills problem is being framed. For hiring leaders, the shift is the story.

How can Facilities Management as a profession attract and retain staff by tackling potential and actual mental health challenges within it? See in this piece, part of a wider feature in the Facilities Management Journal.

Watch or listen as our Associate Director in Facilities Management recruitment, Chris Sycamore, joins The FM Fix podcast from expansive to talk through the FM recruitment landscape for both candidates and employers in 2026.

Featuring insight from industry leaders at the UK’s leading property developers, housebuilders, REITs, and investment firms, The Development Index 2026 is an all-encompassing appraisal of what’s happening across the development lifecycle now, and what employers and employees within it need to know going into 2026 and beyond.

New research reveals that the UK development industry is entering 2026 with cautious optimism but is still held back by deep-rooted staffing challenges that are slowing delivery and squeezing project viability. The Development Index – produced by real estate and construction hiring specialist, Cobalt Recruitment – captures the current challenges, along with the opportunities and pressures shaping the year ahead.

At the end of last year, the government published a new draft of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) for consultation, running until 10 March 2026. See what the draft NPPF edits mean for Development, Planning Policy and Recruitment.