Commercial property development activity falling at record rate say Savills

Savills' November index of commercial development activity shows 13th monthly fall in a row

The UK commercial property sector continued to deteriorate at an increasingly rapid rate last month, new research by Savills has shown.

Its Total Commercial Development Activity Index fell in November for the 13th month in a row, with the rate of decline slightly steeper than in October.

As the credit crunch began to bite, weakening occupier demand led to a new series-record decline in development activity.

Almost 58% of respondents to Savills commercial property survey reported a drop in activity, compared with just 7% signalling a rise.

The index showed a resulting net balance of -50.3% in November, down from -49.7% in October.

The fastest reduction of activity was in private new build. Office development was particularly hard hit. For the fifth time in 2008, however, the least marked fall in activity was shown by refurbishment.

November's survey also found widespread pessimism about the three-month outlook for activity, with the degree of negative sentiment the lowest since the survey began in March 2003.

Commercial developers said they remained concerned over the extent to which lower central bank rates can alleviate the downturn in the sector over the near term as a result of continued lack of credit availability, and a reluctance of clients to commit to new projects.

Commenting on the November survey, Mat Oakley, head of Savills' commercial research department, said the negative outlook was surprising: “This month's survey was surprising in the fact that developers' expectations for the future continued to slide.

“While the lack of debt available is clearly a dragging factor on the market, we expected that November's 150bp cut in the base rate might give developers some confidence that the downturn in occupier demand would be shorter and less deep than it could have been,” he added.

About UK Business Property

Whilst there are more than 20 portals covering residential property in the UK the commercial property market remains relatively unserved, with no site having a majority share of the total available commercial property listed. The internet has taken a significantly greater share of all advertising spend each year as it continues to prove that it is the most effective medium for advertisers to reach their audience.

Traditional estate agency methods remain quite successful in reaching the local market around a property, but do not capture leads from the national and international markets at all well. With increasing mobility of populations and business in the global village, it makes sense to expose commercial properties as efficiently as possible to the whole market. In 2006 there were 6 million searches (based on figures from Yahoo Search) made on the internet in the UK for commercial property of all types. Many of these searches will be fruitless as major search engines do not expose many of the available properties at present.

UK Business Property aims to change this by offering commercial agents important incentives to bring all their properties to the whole market. By linking to UKBP agents will bring more traffic to their websites. For agents who do not yet have a fully featured search on their website UKBP offers it's advanced search functions free of charge, in an easy to implement solution. The advantage is that you keep your visitors on your site and build your brand in your local market, while receiving leads from a national and international audience.

UKBP is committed to supporting agents, with advantageous Agency Terms and a profitable opening offer to it's Founder Members, who Register and upload their properties before 28th February 2007.