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Like most people I’ve spent much of the week trying to keep warm and upright but the business world has rumbled on and my focus of late has been on the commercial property scene.

Our inaugural Business of Property conference, held last Thursday at the Hilton Metropole Hotel at the NEC, threw up a lot of interesting ideas and observations. And whilst we all know things are tough in this sector at present - the perfect storm of scarce property finance, the inability of the public sector to pump prime schemes and a lack of would-be occupiers creating an extremely difficult operating environment for developers and property agents - heads haven’t dropped. More than 600 property professionals turned up at our annual property awards ceremony on the evening of the conference and the mood was lively.

The conference itself brought together interesting speakers from public and private sectors and all had a positive message, whether it be Waheed Nazir from Birmingham City Council outlining the benefits of the Big City Plan, Marketing Birmingham’s Neil Rami talking about its new inward investment strategy or Bruntwood’s Peter Crowther comparing and contrasting the Birmingham and Manchester office markets.

Some of the most interesting stuff came from Dan Smyth of architects BDP - a winner in our awards - who talked about radical thinking from overseas which included a sub-canal car park and an Islamic finance ‘city’. He hypothesised about the future of Birmingham city centre, perhaps a future in which traffic had disappeared from Great Charles Street Queensway and it had become a Ramblas-like boulevard of shops and pavement cafes (I kid you not).

All entertaining stuff but the underlying message I took from it was that there are an awful lot of creative and talented people working in the local property market and with a bit of a kick-start things can get moving again.

I got the same message at our Coventry Economic Forum on Tuesday. Martin Yardley from the city council was on our panel and announced that together with land owner Aviva it was putting in a planning application for a large retail scheme on the southern side of the city centre.

Cynics - perhaps realists - might say that there is a big difference between putting a planning application in and putting a spade in the ground but as Yardley said, Aviva’s co-operation is a real show of support for what Coventry is trying to do.

The city has £1bn worth of city centre regeneration plans - including the huge Friargate scheme near the railway station - and the city’s advantages - its size and the number of graduates it produces, for example - suggests to me that when things start to pick up economically Coventry may see a lot happening very quickly.

Talking of things happening, noises off suggest movement on Two Snowhill in central Birmingham is not far away. Banks may not be willing to fund property projects but funds and institutional investors are starting to become interested and a number of them are sniffing around the Ballymore scheme - which has the added advantage of a pre-let to law firm Wragge & Co.

The industrial and distribution property sector was in a fairly dire state 18 months ago but has really picked up this year. Is it too optimistic to think that a bit of good news in the office sector might get things moving? A new funding stream could be the catalyst.

Any comments? Andy Coyne, Insider