Basingstoke has seen record office take up for the first quarter 2016, according to agents Hollis Hockley.
The firm reports four major office lettings totalling approximately 130,000 sq ft all of which have contracted in the period 1 January – 31 March 2016.
New Voice Media have acquired Rosalind House, a 26,500 sq ft office building on Viables Business Park. Capita have announced a move for approximately 360 staff from various offices in the town to a new regional headquarters at V3, Jays Close, Viables Business Park of 24,800 sq ft. L3 have completed on their move at Chineham Park to a new headquarters at Redwood for 43,000 sq ft and MacMillan have recently exchanged contracts in a planned move from their Houndmills Industrial Estate base to 30,000 sq ft of new offices at Hampshire International Business Park.
In addition Anoto have expanded at Chineham Park to acquire 6,000 sq ft at Forest View, and the agents are also able to report a number of ongoing negotiations with parties within the town and looking to relocate to the town for office space primarily in the 5,000 – 30,000 sq ft range.
Andrew Newman from Hollis Hockley said “The office market in the M3 corridor and Basingstoke in particular has been extremely challenging over the last five or six years since the start of the recession. Activity on the M4 corridor has been significantly better in recent years than the M3 corridor but it is pleasing to note that the improvement in market conditions would now appear to be filtering down to the mid M3 corridor and Basingstoke in particular.
This has been helped by the removal of a significant amount of secondary office space for Permitted Development residential conversions, which has taken over 350,000 sq ft offices out of the market to date, although the end estimates suggest this could well approach 500,000 sq ft of space by the time all the planned schemes have been completed. This has had the added benefit of reducing stock levels and hardening prime office rents as a result.
It was certainly difficult in 2012/13 to have envisaged such a situation in 2016 whereby we would be predicting a shortage of high calibre office space in the foreseeable future”.
