A serious shortage of property and planning professionals has pushed wages for senior surveyors up by 30%, and the lack of talent is starting to constrain Bristol’s office market.
Ron Persaud, co-founder of Change Capital, the developer behind Bristol’s Redcliffe Quarter, where a 600,000 sq ft second phase is due to be unveiled imminently, points to a shortage of professionals in both the public and private sector.
“Council planning departments have been starved of resources at a time when there is a lot of development activity, and that causes issues,” he says.
The shortage of professionals comes at the worst possible time. Although office take-up in H1 2015 was down on H1 2014 (250,000 sq ft, says DTZ), the consensus is that the market is still fizzing with a development pipeline of 400,000 sq ft just waiting to go and a further 200,000 sq ft waiting to see what happens. Around 500,000 sq ft is expected to be delivered in the next three to five years.
Meanwhile, a severe lack of modern, grade A office space is causing a key blockage for Bath and risks causing major employers to look elsewhere.
While the city’s leisure and retail sectors are flying, Bath has been woefully underprovided in terms of modern office space for years due to an historic moratorium on new development and a more recent trend of office-to-residential conversions. As a result, office take-up in the city has been severely restricted in this year, plummeting from around 90,000 sq ft in 2014, to just 20,000 sq ft in H1 2015.
To read the full analysis of Bristol’s chronic shortage of planners click here.
For more on Bath’s shortage of grade A office space click here.
