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Take up of office space in the City is now at its lowest level since 2009, market research firm Equipe told City AM.
The last six months have seen no moves to offices larger than 50,000 square feet according to the new research. Take up in the last quarter was 834,000 square feet, which is down on the preceding quarter.
Many fear that the UK’s faltering economic recovery is to blame for the slowing of office uptake in the City.
However other parts of the capital have done much better, bolstered by the take up of office space by technology firms.
In particular east central London has seen the take-up of office space in Farringdon rise by 125 per cent. According to the research low rental prices in the area have made its popularity rise.
Overall take-up of office space in central London has risen by six per cent. The West End saw take-up increase 22 percent in the last quarter mostly thanks to Google’s move to Central St Giles and Double Negative’s take-up of space at 160 Portland Place.
Meanwhile, the UK economy overall is still suffering. Data released on Wednesday showed that the labour market is much weaker than thought.
In the three months up to June the unemployment level rose up to 7.9 per cent, from 7.7 per cent in the preceding three months.
July saw a further 37,000 people sign up for jobless benefits, an increase of more than 5,000 from the June figure.
Additionally, retail figures in July came in much weaker than expected, leading to some speculating that the lack of consumer spending could hurt the economy’s already limping recovery.
Editor’s notes: In 2022, the uptake of office space across Central London was 10.1 million square feet which represented an increase of 18 per cent compared to the year before.
The take-up in the City of London in 2022 was 5.2 million square feet which was 23 per cent higher than 2021’s 4.4 million square feet.
In the West End in 2022, the uptake of office space was 4.1 million square feet, representing a 7 per cent increase on 2021’s 3.8 million square feet.
The UK unemployment rate for February to April 2023 increased by 0.1 percentage points on the quarter to 3.8 per cent.