Birmingham’s property great and good turned out for EG’s annual reception at the Malmaison hotel in the city last month.
A number of guests were looking a tad bleary-eyed after staying up for most of the night to watch the general election’s results unfold. Some even stayed up until 5am before admitting defeat and getting a well-deserved couple of hours’ rest.
The Malmaison did a marvellous job of feeding hungry guests, while the EG team grilled them for the latest market insight.
The hot topic of conversation – apart from the general election and the Conservatives’ surprise majority win – was unsurprisingly HSBC’s recent decision to relocate staff out of its Canary Wharf HQ into 210,000 sq ft of new space at the 1m sq ft mixed-use Arena Central development. With HSBC’s new HQ at 2 Arena Central fronting Broad Street, the west side of the city centre is seeing a resurgence in demand.
Meanwhile, the neighbouring Paradise development will also see a further 1.8m sq ft of office-led mixed-use space in the area.
With HSBC joining Deutsche Bank in relocating to the city, can we expect to see similar moves from other high street banks? It is a topic we have covered within this Birmingham Focus (see p94) and in a podcast.
The hotly contested EGi deals competition winners were announced, with DTZ (pre-Cushman & Wakefield merger announcement) named most active agent and Siddall Jones’ Edward Siddall-Jones named top dealmaker.
To see more photos from the event and to listen to the podcast, follow this link.
