Office Space Manchester > Serviced Offices

Birmingham has traditionally been regarded as the second city outside of London, due to it’s esteemed history of industry and large population.  In fact with 992,000 inhabitants, Birmingham has almost twice as many citizens as Manchester and so would naturally claim to be the “second city” outside the capital.

However, Manchester in the last decade has grown rapidly, particularly in the service, banking, legal and financial sectors with many major UK and global corporations with either a presence or their headquarters in Manchester.  These include Bank of New York, HSBC, Ernst and Young, and Co-op to name but a few.  According to Wikipedia Manchester is… “one of the largest financial centres in Europe with more than 15,000 people employed in banking and finance and more than 60 banking institutions”  The Spinningfields development, a £1.5 million mixed used scheme and the imposing Beetham Tower, both epitomise the recent commercial success of the City.

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Commercial property agents GVA Grimley have said that Manchester, out of nine UK cities surveyed, has the worse imbalance of demand vs supply.  Staggeringly, out of nine cities surveyed, Manchester accounted for 30% of all available grade A space.  It is also argued that this will take four year to  be soaked up by occupiers, even it take up rates were at the levels they were before the recession took hold. More bad news emerged from CoStar, who have reported that total city centre office take-up fell 58 per cent to 141,824 sq ft in the first quarter of this year.

And it seems the over supply problem will be compounded by the fact that the are five speculative schemes of over 50,000 sq ft currently being built in the city centre.  No wonder some landlords and agents will be getting jittery about the prospect of getting these half finished buildings filled with tenants.  One such scheme is the Origin which is located on the corner of Princess Street and Whitworth Street.  This will comprise of over 60,000 sq ft of office space as well as encompassing a hotel and residential units. The developers West Properties stated that work was three months behind schedule but that it would have an advantage over other properties as it was a mixed use scheme.  They are also planning another scheme on Desngate but this will be completed outside the timeframe in the GVA report.

Hello.  This a new blog about office news and views across Manchester and the Northwest.