High availability with Mid Town offices

Ashurst Real Estate recently prepared a market report for a client making a planning application for a change of use of an office building in Covent Garden to residential use.

Pre COVID, Covent Garden was a popular office location ,with historically low vacancy rates.

Post COVID, it may still be a popular location but the number of companies actually occupying offices has dramatically fallen.

Not unsurprisingly, with occupancy rates falling, availability rates have increased and at the date of our report, Covent Garden amazingly, had close to 25% of total offices available for rent.

Other key local property markets including King’s Cross and Euston, Bloomsbury, Holborn and Clerkenwell also currently have high availability rates.

Across all of these local markets, approximately 20% of all offices are currently available for rent and this is more 6 million square feet numerically.

In Q1 2020, before COVID, only 2 million square feet were available for rent.

But the dramatic increase in the amount of available offices in the market is not really the main story as far as we are concerned.

The surprising revelation of our research is the apparent resilience of rental values with only small fluctuations being demonstrated.

One would assume that with such an imbalance between supply and demand, rental values would have plummeted but this does not appear to be the case…..at least on the face of it and we have our own opinions as to why.

Each of the key local markets has a similar story to tell over the amount of available offices and the fluctuation of rental values but there are some clear winners and losers.

Contact Ashurst Real Estate if you want to know which category your office is in.

020 7419 5119 | ashurstre.london