Over the past few years, Southwark has experience a real growth in popularity and naturally, along with that rents have gone up quite considerably, as they are doing all around London. The percentage increase in Southwark is higher than most of the other submarkets in Central London. 

With all the discussion recently about lack of housing, spiralling property prices in some areas of the country as well as artificially high rents, any residential development under way or in the pipeline in London is likely to catch the eye.  According to the Irish Times, the Ballymore development and investment group, is on the hunt for a joint venture partner for three large-scale residential developments in London. 

It was only a few years ago that Shoreditch was considered a bit of a dump by most people. A place you would not want to be after dark and a bit run down in general. Over the past two to three years there has been an obvious change in the area. It is now the coolest place to be in London, almost so much so that it is too cool for the really cool people to go any more. The people who went to Shoreditch ‘before it was cool’.  

Following our recent piece on award-winning London offices, restaurant group Nando’s has shown how much importance it places on having pleasant surroundings in which its staff can relax and work. 

The West End office market is now well and truly feeling the pinch and analysts are suggesting it could be the case for up to three years with a current demand of 3 million square feet of space. Over the past 12 months, the market has increasingly got tighter and tighter for available office space and has seen rents start to climb back towards the highs of 2007. This is certainly the case for parts of Mayfair and St.

It seems as if it should be easy to find an office in London. You go onto google type in offices in the area of your choice and you should be able to see everything that is available. Then pick and choose which spaces you would like to view. Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way and it can become very frustrating spending hours online searching for offices and not coming up with anything that could work.

Further signs are appearing that the economy in London is continuing to prosper, and the findings of a recent survey by a recruitment firm are particularly reassuring. 

This week The Guardian reported on the acquisition by a German landlord of almost £2 billion of prime London property. 

KMPG has just agreed the pre-let of the new Grosvenor building in London’s Mayfair. This deal represents the highest rent achieved since Temasek, a Singaporean company who paid £130 psf for the top two floors at 23 King Street in September when they took 8,400 sq. ft. of space from the Standard Life Investment Portfolio. 

London is not the only city seeing consistent growth, particularly in property investment. Germany has also experienced the highest volumes of investment since 2007, according to recent figures. The deals in Germany account for nearly half of Europe’s commercial property investments, with home-grown deals involving German buyers amounting to almost half of those deals.