Deloitte’s brief stint in a WeWork office in Manchester is helping the team rethink what it wants from its next home in the city.
Back in 2020, the audit firm agreed a deal to leave its Hardman Street base of 10 years and move to two floors of flexible office space in Hanover Building (pictured), provided by WeWork. Now the company is looking at other offices in the city – the expectation is that it will leave the WeWork office and once again take a more traditional lease. But although the terms of the lease may go back to a more conventional set-up, the space itself won’t.
“The space of the future will be different to the space of today,” Simon Bedford, a Manchester-based partner at Deloitte Real Estate, tells EG. “Whatever we will do in terms of our permanent space, it has to respond to the new demands of our people and clients.
“If we take a lease, which we’re likely to do, we will lease a certain amount of floor space and then we will have to work out how to fit it so that it works for the workforce that we’ve got. It’s not a precise science.”
Bedford expects to take inspiration from the flex space he and his colleagues have worked in, including an emphasis on breakout rooms to allow for more informal conversations with colleagues or clients.
“This space has lots of places where you can sit and talk, but they don’t feel as formal as a meeting room with a door and a sign on it [saying] ‘do not disturb’,” he says. “I think we need a lot more of that. People like the idea of being slightly more relaxed in the working environment. I think, generally, they welcome less formality.”
Deloitte is now “very well” advanced in its search for permanent office space, although Bedford says it has yet to settle on a final choice. He and his colleagues have set parameters to help narrow down the shortlist but he acknowledges there is a finite list from which to pick. “There’s never a lot of space to look at,” he says. “There will always be space being brought forward but there will never be loads of it.”
Take-up in Manchester’s office market leapt by a third over the course of 2021, according to Savills but occupiers looking for the best properties have slim pickings. The agency says the market posted a grade-A vacancy rate of just 4.9% last year, its largest year-on-year drop since 2013. Supply of grade-A space stood at 988,396 sq ft, a sizeable drop of more than a fifth on a year earlier.
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