Prime London tenants 'seek smaller rental units with better amenities'

By Graham Norwood

Prime central London is seeing the rise of the micro-apartment, according to new research, as squeezed accommodation budgets have seen singles and couples opting for location and convenience over size.

According to data analysed by London Central Portfolio there is increasing demand for smaller properties which offer an affordable option for tenants who wish to be centrally located near their place of employment or study. 

In a similar dynamic to prime London’s sales market - where luxury properties have suffered most in the face of the changing tax landscape and Brexit uncertainty - LCP says prime London’s rental market is also notably fragmenting by size and price band.

Over the last 12 months, 42 per cent of properties let have been studios or one bedrooms by tenants prioritising lifestyle and transport links over square footage. On the other hand, demand has been notably slower for larger rental properties as families consider less central options, offering greater value and more space. 

“Tenants are now looking for more affordable options, choosing central locations and an easy commute to work or university. This is reinforcing the new trend for the globally mobile to seek highly specified micro-apartments, with well optimised space, whilst families tend to opt for more suburban locations where smaller budgets can stretch to larger homes and ideally the possibility of outside space. Indeed, significant discounts to asking rent of over 10 per cent for the most expensive, luxury rentals are now being reported” explains Naomi Heaton, LCP’s chief executive.

It is also taking much less time to find tenants for smaller micro-apartments. 

Over the last year, the average marketing times for two-bedroom properties has reached 85 days, increasing to 98 days for three bedroom and a significant 119 days for three-plus bedroom units. 

This is 42 per cent longer on average than for one-bedroom or studio units, which are seeing a much greater level of demand from the single tenant and couples that the PCL market attracts. For LCP’s portfolio, 63.9 per cent of tenants are now single dwellers.

Another indication of the trend in prime London towards micro-apartments is the number of properties being rented by price band. 

Over 1/3 of properties let have rents under £500 per week whilst only 3.2 per cent of units have been rented over £2,000 per week. Some 70 per cent of units being let now have rents of under £750 per week.

https://www.lettingagenttoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2017/7/prime-london-tenants-seek-smaller-rental-units-with-better-amenities

HSBC cash sweetener aims to entice staff to new Birmingham HQ

By Rupert Neate
Canary Wharf staff offered up to £2,500 for each employee persuaded to relocate from London as CEO admits to ‘tricky’ task

HSBC’s new UK headquarters under construction in Birmingham, March 2017. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

HSBC is offering its employees cash bonuses of up to £2,500 if they can convince a colleague to move from London to the bank’s new British headquarters in Birmingham.

The bank has created a special bonus scheme to encourage staff to “help us find the right people for Birmingham” because it is struggling to entice enough of its staff to make the 120-mile move before its new office opens in January.

Staff who manage to convince a friend to make the move to Birmingham will be rewarded with a cash bonus of between £750 and £2,500 depending on the seniority of the new Midlands recruit.


Britain’s biggest bank has only convinced just over half of its target of 1,040 people to make the move more than two years after announcing it would switch its UK banking operations from Canary Wharf to Birmingham.

The new cash bonus comes on top of the bank already attempting to sweeten the change by making its standard relocation package “more attractive” with “support for housing and children’s schooling”.

António Simões, HSBC’s chief executive, told reporters last week, during a visit to the bank’s new 10-storey 210,000-sq-ft office building in Centenary Square: “We have had some challenges but today we are ahead of where we thought we would be, with around 53% of the roles filled.”

Simões, who took over as HSBC’s chief executive in 2015, said it had proven “trickier” than expected to convince some specialists, particularly in areas like marketing and communications, to make the move, which he described as “quite a big task still”.

“We’ve made the standard package more attractive by offering for example support for housing and children’s schooling,” Simões said. He did not mention the cash bonuses, which were later found to be offered on HSBC internal staff website.

A HSBC spokesman said that despite the difficulties in convincing staff to move, the bank was convinced that its new £200m office would open on schedule.

The reluctance of the bank’s staff to move to the Midlands comes despite much lower house prices and a cheaper cost of living in Birmingham compared with London.

According to the property prices index provided by Hometrack the average home in Birmingham costs £152,000, less than a third of the average price in London. But house prices in Birmingham are rising much faster than in the capital, with prices up 7.7% in the year to April compared to 3.5% in London.

The new Birmingham office will contain HSBC’s UK retail and commercial bank, which is being split from the riskier parts of the group under the government’s ringfencing rules, which come into force at the start of 2019.

The continuing difficulty in recruiting staff for the Birmingham office may concern the bank’s official monitor, who was last year reported to have described the move as “a programme in crisis”. Michael Cherkasky, a lawyer who was installed as the bank’s official monitor following HSBC’s £1.2bn fine for money laundering offences from the US in 2012, was said to have expressed concerns to executives about the lack of staff willing to make the move. He said a delay could lead to the bank’s UK division lacking the ability to maintain proper money-laundering controls.

HSBC, which has 16 million customers in the UK, selected Birmingham for its British headquarters partly because of its purchase of Midland Bank in 1992. About 48,000 of HSBC’s 257,000 staff work in Britain.

Many British banks and other businesses are trying to relocate parts of their operations out of London because of the rising cost of office space in the capital. Of the 2.2 million people employed in financial services jobs in the UK, two-thirds now work outside London, according to data from the industry lobby group TheCityUK.

Financial jobs in Birmingham rose by 6.9% between 2013 and 2015, the group said. Other large financial employers in the city include Deutsche Bank, which has increased its Birmingham staff from 35 in 2007 to about 1,500 today.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/04/hsbc-cash-sweetener-aims-to-entice-staff-to-new-birmingham-hq