According to the latest report from Colliers International, April wasn’t a great month for the UK commercial property market.
The commercial property snapshot stated April saw a slow down in office space transactions.
Colliers declared that: ‘The excellent weather, the long Easter break and the royal wedding seem to have disrupted whatever market momentum may have been building. Nevertheless, Property Data figures suggest that, despite the slow, April transactions were generally in line with April 2010. Year-to-date investment volumes are still up by 45% on 2010 with around £11bn transacted so far, although many Q1 deals were ‘overhangs’ from 2010.
Despite the good news in regards to an increasing investment volume in 2011, there are still a large number of forced administration sales. The Colliers Report said, ‘consensual and receivership sales continue, with the last of the Halabi portfolio being sold. Administrators are also selling assets from the Kenmore Property Group, and Lloyds is reported to have 38properties worth around £60m on the market at a collective yield of 9%. NAMA, the third largest lender to UK property, announced its intention to sell around €2.5bn of UK property assets over the next three years.
On the surface things still appear to rocky for the UK commercial property market. But solace can be found when the factors for April’s slow down are taken into consideration.
With the two double bank holidays (which I think we were all secretly glad of), the UK basically lost a whole week of trading time during the month. April is a shorter month as it stands and when added to the extra time people have taken off during the week in between the bank holidays, it is easy to see why transactions in commercial property have slowed during April.
Now everybody is back to work, let us hope May is a fantastic month for the UKs commercial property market.
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