The city continues to rise pass everybody’s expectations with new building plans for more tower buildings and rents continuously hitting new heights. During this current office vacancy crisis, the City has been the area which has been least effect and had the highest vacancy rates across the board (still critically low, but slightly better than the other boroughs of London). There is a number of reasons for this; namely being that the City council turned down the change in policy to allows office space to be converted to residential, which happened everywhere else across the board and being a main factor for the current office shortage. Another is that the City has been traditionally the home to the financial sector, housing the likes of banks and insurance firms. As these types of industries where badly affected by the recession, they are taking slightly longer to bounce back.
However, this being said, stats show that the demand in the City is strong and the supply is tightening. Developers are acknowledging this demand and are moving toward increasing the supply, this can be seen through the types of developments being planned at the moment. Recent reports show there has been an increase on 11% from last year on the number of developments being planned for over 20 stories.
Teresa Beatty, a commercial surveyor at Morgan Pryce said “finding 1000 – 1500 sq. ft. units in the city is just as tight as any other part of London, even without the flood gates to converting to residential opened.”
This news was brought to you by Morgan Pryce, a specialist tenant acquisition agent with offices in Oxford Circus and the City. Morgan Pryce specialises in search, negotiation and project management and works exclusively for tenants.
