London flexible office provider Workspace is bracing for large firms to continue vacating, despite signs of midweek office work returning to pre-Covid levels in the capital.<\/p>\n
Workspace said it was focused on rebuilding occupancy and taking a \u201cpragmatic\u201d approach to pricing.<\/p>\n
The London-listed company said it was still seeing larger customers vacating over the latest quarter, after previously warning investors over the retreat.<\/p>\n
This is set to continue over the coming months with the company expecting more businesses to ditch its buildings in Camden.<\/p>\n
Occupancy dipped by 0.3% between April and June to total 82.2%, Workspace said.<\/p>\n
The business has previously flagged that confidence among some of its customers has been weakened by wider economic uncertainty.<\/p>\n
It comes despite signs that midweek office work has rebounded \u2013 with property giant British Land recently saying occupancy across its estate had returned to pre-Covid levels in central London.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, recent official data showed that 28% of the UK workforce remained in hybrid work, meaning spending some days at the office or at home.<\/p>\n
Workspace owns a portfolio of about 65 properties across London and the south-east of England, providing units to some 4,000 businesses.<\/p>\n
At the end of the latest quarter, rents totalled \u00a3138.6 million, down slightly on the previous quarter.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs expected, occupancy declined slightly in the quarter and we have more large vacations to come in Q2 (the second quarter),\u201d\u00a0Lawrence Hutchings, Workspace\u2019s chief executive said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur immediate focus remains on stabilising and, over time, rebuilding occupancy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Hutchings said it was taking action to \u201cretain and attract more customers\u201d, including refurbishments at some of its sites and targeting marketing efforts for local offices with fewer occupants.<\/p>\n
He added that the group had sold lower-performing sites, most recently in the Brentford and Ladbroke Grove areas, for a combined \u00a315 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London flexible office provider Workspace is bracing for large firms to continue vacating, despite signs of midweek office…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,16,15,101570],"class_list":{"0":"post-266566","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-workspace"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114862860866840134","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}