CoStar News spoke to regional property experts to review the biggest deals and trends across major UK cities in 2024. Investment partner Ian Lambert gave his opinion.
Ian Lambert, investment partner, told CoStar News that the last 12 to 18 months had been some of the most challenging he had experienced in his career, describing the Bristol market at the start of the year as “turgid”.
However, he insisted the market “always finds a way to operate”, with a couple of interest rate cuts helping to give the market some much-needed momentum.
“At the beginning of the year, you couldn’t sell office buildings for love nor money for a variety of reasons. Now all of a sudden, we’ve got three in lawyers’ hands and a couple of them went to bids.
“What that does in the office market is that – if you know you have an out – any buyer can say, ‘right, I can now buy a building because I know where my exit yield is going to be’, and it gives them confidence coming in, and we’ve certainly seen that start to happen.”
He added: “We are getting some demand, there are deal happening. So, I think we’re going to end up on a bit of a high and I’m hopeful that will follow through to 2025… people are getting a bit more comfortable and [vendors’] pricing aspirations have lowered to where the market should be”.
View the entire article here: https://www.costar.com/article/774624107/regional-review-2024-bigger-office-lettings-resurface-while-investors-vie-for-multilet-industrial
