The concept of local jobs for local people was put to an audience of property professionals in Buckinghamshire at the latest Bucks Social.
Speaking in a panel debate Michael Garvey, managing director of Chandler Garvey, told the October 10 meeting, sponsored and hosted by Hunts Office at High Wycombe, his plans for workspaces to be close to residential settlements due to the changing market and the way people wished to work and live.
He had acted for Kingsmead Business Park where many of the offices were upgraded 10 years ago, which enabled 70,000 sq ft to be let at good rents and on long leases. But in the last five years he had been trying to let space there without success. That park has now been acquired by Jansons Property for industrial.
Mr Garvey said: “If you go back 200 years everybody worked and lived locally and so, conceptually, we’ve got to start thinking about that again.”
He had once sought to raise Buckinghamshire’s commercial property profile in relation to Maidenhead, Slough and Reading but says the markets have changed again and now he sees a future of living close to workspaces.
He went on: “We’ve got a significant tension between the need for houses and the need for employment floorspace and we’ve got to be conscious of the changes being made to regulation that favours one or the other.
“At the moment, I think housebuilding is probably more important than commercial floorspace but very quickly we will all be saying ‘we haven’t got any places for people to work’.
“So we’ve got to, in plan making terms, think of local jobs for local people and I think it builds upon the provision of small office space. Like it or not, although Bucks has some big businesses, it’s a small firm economy.”
Workspace, rather than office space, he said could be provided near residential settlements
“It means places like Bourne End or Princes Risborough have got to think ‘ok we’ve got to have a lot of houses in some locations so where are the people going to work? They live locally so they should be able to work locally’.
“It’s about providing sites on the edges of these small towns where you can build small units of workspaces. That might not solve the big problem of losing tens of thousands of sq ft of office space but, if you can start to rebalance that by allocating sites on the edges of small conurbations, where you can build a campus of maybe 20-30,000 sq ft in units of 500-1,000 sq ft with some co-working, you can start to offer opportunities for people to start to work locally.”
He argued that the way people live has become more important to them and made commuting less attractive.
He added: “If you can work 10 minutes from where you live, that’s quite compelling compared to driving an hour.”
Earlier, the issues around changing workplaces were described by both meeting sponsor Iain Poupart, key accounts manager for Hunts Office, and Helen Shellabear, managing director of Shellwin Real Estate, who told the meeting that demand is coming back through a variety of reasons including downsizing, firms who have stayed beyond their lease and eventually been forced to move and those needing to improve their ESG.
She said: “There’s no one theme as to why people are coming through the door but the one theme there is is that people are struggling to make decisions because there doesn’t seem to be one decision maker.”
She said nowadays five or six employees from a potential occupier have been known to visit before a potential move, rather than just a facilities manager.
‘The office’, she said, is no longer the right description for some occupiers. One tenant at refurbished space, let by Shellwin Real Estate, refers to it as its ‘studio’.
She said: “That really subtle language change has done wonders for our business.”
Jacqueline Craig, senior associate – real estate & development for law firm Blaser Mills, reported recent observations she has made including many commercial property owners seeking to dispose of their portfolios by the end of the month due to rising capital gains tax.
She said some property owners are using commercial buildings differently such as letting out single rooms in buildings which were once fully let to one occupier, and then having shared facilities for more than one tenant.
Some Thames Valley developers, she said, are landbanking and some are seeking office spaces for residential conversions.
Image (l-r facing audience): Matthew Battle (UK Property Forums managing director and meeting moderator), Michael Garvey, Jacqueline Craig, Darran Eggleton (head of planning policy and compliance for Buckinghamshire Council), Helen Shellabear and Henry Revill (development manager for Jansons Property).
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