Soho's Ham Yard Bombsite Redevlopment

A site in London that has been left largely untouched since the Blitz during the Second World War is to be developed into a hotel and houses.

The three acre site called Ham Yard in London’s Soho has been acquired for £30 million by husband and wife team Tim and Kit Kemp who are to develop it into a £90 million boutique hotel with housing through their business Firmdale Hotels.

Just off Regent Street, the hub of London’s shopping district, the site will become a 100 room hotel and 50,000 square feet of accommodation, of which a third will be affordable housing.

If planning goes through work will start at the beginning of next year.

London West End Rent Revival

Bain Capital has agreed one of the largest rental deals ever in London’s West End, The Daily Telegraph has learned, in a deal that suggests a revival in the demand for business space.

Great Portland Estates Purchase in Cheapside

Property group Great Portland Estates has splashed out £45.8m on a retail and office building in the heart of London’s financial district.

The company has exchanged contracts to purchase the property at 90 Queen Street, situated just off Cheapside, the road that leads from the west to the Bank of England.

The building comprises 68,400 square feet of space. The office accommodation is the UK office of Intesa Sanpaulo SPA and is occupied under a lease until 2017 with a tenant option to break in 2013.

London; The Best City In the World To do Business

London Mayor, Boris Johnson has travelled to New York to promote London as the best city in the world in which to do business.

London has already been voted the top European city for business 19 years on the trot, but sceptics argue that the credit crunch may have knocked it off its pedestal.

The UK economy has certainly taken a knock over the last two years but, in many ways, that has made London’s offer more compelling. Exchange rates have made the capital a much more competitive city for those with dollars or euros. There is more choice of prime office space and more opportunity to recruit high-quality home-grown staff.

And, while the financial City may struggle to reassert itself in the new world order, London still has a huge amount to offer.

The UK as a whole produces the best television in the world. The advertising and marketing industries thrive in Britain, especially in the most cosmopolitan, lively and exciting city on earth, where culture, cuisine and creativity combine to create a place that perhaps only visitors fully appreciate.

While we Londoners grumble about crime and grime, London is still a place where the police don’t carry guns.

It is home to more of the world’s top 100 universities than any other city. We have fantastic high-tech medical facilities and low-cost fast internet connection. London is the world’s most wireless city.

Four of the top six law firms are centred here and we are still home to more US banks than New York.

Read more: http://www.propertyweek.com/story.asp?sectioncode=38&storycode=3149103&c=3#ixzz0Rqms6SQr

Low supply to push London office rents up in 2010

Prime rents in London's City and West End office markets will return to growth in 2010 thanks to flourishing global stock markets and a rebound in tenant demand this summer.

A sudden drop off in speculative office developments due by 2012 and smaller-than-expected occupier distress in 2009 supports forecasts of a 4 percent rise in prime City rents to 44 pounds per square foot and a 3 percent rise in West End prime rents to 67 pounds per square foot in 2010.

City rents, down more than a fifth in 2009, are expected to rise by 37 percent to 58 pounds per square foot by end-2012. West End rents, down 30 percent this year, are set to rise by 42 percent to 92.50 per square foot over the same period.
Reuters

Candy Brothers Wait Out London Commercial Property Slump

In the six months after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, almost no London homes were sold in the so-called super-prime market, where houses start at £10 million.

In the first seven months of 2009, 26 £10-million-plus homes sold, compared with 75 for all of 2008 and 119 in 2007, according to Savills, a property group.

The Candy Brothers weren’t spared. They backed out of a plan to build a development in London called NoHo Square that included 244 apartments. Another project to erect 552 apartments on a 5-hectare, or 13-acre, site called Chelsea Barracks also went awry.

But the Candys say they can afford to wait for the property market to revive. One reason, they say, is that they cashed out of a joint venture they formed in 2006 to buy two Kensington hotels for £69 million. They planned to build 97 apartments there, they say, until they were offered £320 million by investors from Abu Dhabi.
That deal closed in March 2008, and the Candys pocketed about half of the £251 million profit, according to Steven Smith, head of corporate finance for the CPC Group, a Guernsey-based property developer owned by Chris Candy.
Bloomberg