The continued sluggish lettings activity in the UK retail market is due to the economic downturn and not to the rise of Internet retailing, says CBRE in a recent Viewpoint article. The amount of sales diverted from shops by the rise of internet ... Read more
The British Retail Consortium says the UK town-centre shop vacancy rate in April rose to 11.9%, from 10.9% in January, to reach the highest level since the BRC/Springboard survey began in July 2011. The BRC’s director general Helen Dickinson ... Read more
Commercial development activity dipped during April after a strong March, according to Savills, which says its Total Commercial Development Activity Index reached a net balance of +5.1% in April – the eighth consecutive positive reading – down from ... Read more
CBRE says UK commercial property performance in April was largely unchanged from the previous month at the All Property level, with total returns reaching 0.6% compared with 0.5% in March. This took the annual return to 3.1% for the year to April ... Read more
Lambert Smith Hampton says the Manchester offices market has made a positive start to 2013, with first-quarter city-centre take-up of 271,000 sq ft compared with 170,000 sq ft a year ago and roughly in line with the 275,000 sq ft seen in Q4 ... Read more
Jones Lang LaSalle says 2.5m sq ft of office space in Central London was let during Q1 2013, the highest total since the end of 2010. The 863,000 sq ft forward sale to Google at King’s Cross certainly boosted this figure, but JLL says “demand does ... Read more
The latest London Office Crane Survey from Deloitte Real Estate strikes a positive note, with 9.7m sq ft of office space in Central London now under construction – the highest for four years and an increase of 8% over the past six months. Letting ... Read more
At Knight Frank’s well-attended M25 breakfast earlier this week, the firm’s head of South East Investment said demand for offices in the South East of England and the M25 region is arguably as strong now as at any time over the past six years. But ... Read more
Service charges account for a significant proportion of total operating costs for most office occupiers – but tenants often overlook them when negotiating a lease. Lambert Smith Hampton points out that tenants tend to focus heavily on rent payable ... Read more
Recent data from the Bank of England shows a growing willingness among lenders to finance commercial property deals. Jones Lang LaSalle notes that the Q1 2013 lending figures from the BoE report that UK bank exposure to real estate remained stable at ... Read more
