After England rugby’s desperately poor recent form in this year’s 6 Nations cup, we are all wondering where glimmers of hope and better sporting days will come from to lift our spirits. Who knows, with Rooney’s current electrifying form, that day may be here sooner than we think against Egypt, (the Africa Nations cup champions) on Wednesday evening. However, in the meantime, some bright lights of hope (no more green shoots please) appear to be starting to shine again on the UK commercial property sector this year.

2010, and in particular the last 4 weeks, has seen a quite remarkable welcome return of not only confidence but also the buyers and investors to the UK commercial property market ……..and plenty of them! In fact, our strong network of sourcing partners, developers and financial institutions have never been busier and continue to locate and put forward off-market deals to meet this growing demand for strong yielding, commercial property. What a difference a year makes, I hear you say!

So what commercial investments are in greatest demand from these buyers and investors?

Put simply, ‘anything and everything’ that can deliver strong yields, has a solid anchor tenant on a long lease and is in ‘prime’ central London or the surrounding area. Tenanted offices and retail outlets in central London and logistical sites along the M4 corridor seem to be the most common requests.

In fact, the ideal is the following; we recently sourced and sold a 10,000 sq ft tenanted office property on Sackville Street in the heart of Mayfair. The property had a strong anchor tenant, (HQ for a large firm of European tax consultants), on a 10 year+ lease yielding over 6.0%. The deal exchanged and completed within 28 days which is every consultants dream. Safe to say both our buyer and seller were extremely happy too. Mind you by the time of exchange my colleagues had been approached by more than a couple of dozen other buyers wanting to view and bid for the same property.

We continue to try to source this holy grail of similar ‘off market’ London commercial investment opportunities.

Next week I will take a closer look at whether the same can be said for the UK residential investment market. Is the buyer confidence returning here as fast? Where is the current interest? Which UK locations offer the same value and how is it measured?

Well, until next week, good luck Rooney, keep smiling Martin Johnson and here’s to the continued growth in investor confidence and activity in the UK commercial property market.

All comments welcome

Best Regards

Andy Kiwanuka
Torcana UK Ltd

Tags: Andy Kiwanuka, High Yield UK Property, London Commercial Property, Torcana UK, UK Commercial Property

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:55 am and is filed under UK Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.