According to a new report from CB Richard Ellis, the British capital is effectively the only major European city where demand for office space has been strong enough to see substantial quantities of new office buildings coming on stream in 2010.
For the most part, the pace of office space development in major Asian cities, with the exception of Tokyo, has been much faster than in the rest of the world, with close to two-thirds of all office space buildings expected to come from the continent between now and 2012.
The reason for the relative lack of office development in Europe and North America is reckoned to be a straightforward lack of corporate and investor confidence in what were comfortably the world’s strongest markets prior to 2007.
In general terms, Asian economies are further ahead in their cycle of development, difficulty and recovery, which is having a knock-on effect on the way their office markets are behaving, CBRE’s experts have suggested.
“London is currently the only major Western European market where reviving interest in development looks likely to produce a significant upturn in new construction activity over the coming year,” noted Richard Holberton, director of CBRE’s research in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
“A key influence on the pace of activity will also be the availability of finance. Elsewhere in the region, there are isolated examples of renewed interest in development, but these mostly reflect building-specific circumstances rather than a general pick-up in market momentum,” he added.