Property round-up: Merepark launches Lewis’s offices; house sales fall again; and more
DEVELOPER Merepark is to formally launch the 75,000 sq ft of office space at its £160m Central Village scheme to the Liverpool market today.
The offices, which are housed in the Grade II-listed former Lewis’s building, have been branded as The Department and will take up four floors of the L-shaped Lewis’s building. It is currently being refurbished by Merepark’s construction arm and once complete will also contain an Accor Adagio aparthotel.
Work on the building, which has been part-financed with a £4m grant from the former North West Development Agency, is expected to complete in November.
The Department will contain large, rectangular floors of up to 18,000 sq ft of Grade A space, which is being marketed at £15.50 per sq ft. The offices can be accessed either from Renshaw St or the Plaza level of Central Village, and a new entrance hall with a full-height atrium hall will be created. Joint letting agents are DTZ and CBRE.
Merepark associate director Neal Hunter said: “Central Village is an extremely complex scheme and after several years of hard work we are delighted to see both the hotel and offices taking shape. There has not been a building of this quality in this part of the city before and we believe the inherent strengths of The Department will ensure that it finds a successful niche in the Liverpool office market”.
Chris Lloyd of DTZ said: “The great attraction of The Department is its large rectangular floors of circa 18,000 sq ft.
“Combined with the excellence of the location for staff being mid-way between Lime Street Station and the retail within Liverpool One, the building is ideally suited for call centre or back office use.
“The adjacent leisure facilities in Central Village and Mersey Rail’s Central Station add further to this advantage.”
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WIRRAL-based property consultancy Smith & Sons has sold two neighbouring Grade I-listed Georgian town houses on Hamilton Square in Birkenhead.
Numbers 47 and 48 Hamilton Square have a combined total floor area of just under 6,000 sq ft over five floors and have been bought by a local entrepreneur who plans to renovate them into a business/technology incubator for SMEs. 
Internal fit out works are set to begin next month, with the incubator due to open later this year.
Jason Wadeson of Smith and Sons said: “There is a definite need in Wirral for an incubator providing space and assistance to new and emerging technology-driven businesses.
“The central location of these buildings means that smaller and emerging businesses have the opportunity to sit amongst other more established firms in this business district.”
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HOUSE sales in the North West of England are showing few signs of a recovery, according to the latest Housing Market Survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
The average number of sales per surveyor completed in the region during May was 15 – a 42% drop on the peak of 26 completed during the peak of the housing boom in May 2007.
RICS said that with affordable mortgages now harder to come by, homes are taking much longer to sell. Surveyors sold just 17% of the homes on their books in May, compared with 28% five years earlier. The continued lack of activity is also means prices are continuing to fall, and there has been a net balance of surveyors reporting fall prices each month since July 2010.
Perhaps surprisingly, the amount of homes coming onto the market and the level of new buyer interest in the North West remained in positive territory, though.
Derek Coates, a surveyor at Liverpool-based Vennmore said: “After an encouraging start to the year the market has slowed slightly. This is hardly surprising given the uncertainty in the eurozone. However it is still the case that a realistically-priced property will find a buyer in an acceptable timescale.”
Andrew Holmes of Carter Jonas in Cumbria added: “Some very good instructions and an encouraging number of buyer enquiries have given an optimistic view of the market over the next few months. However, there are still far too many applicants who cannot proceed until their own property has sold.”
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CHRISTIE + Co has been appointed as selling agents for the Sumners Hotel in Preston.
The pub is being offered on the remaining five years of a protected 10-year lease from 2007, free of tie on wines, spirits and alcopops. It has an an open-plan lounge/dining room for 140 covers, a separate public bar/function room for 40 covers and 3-bedroom owner’s accommodation. It also includes an outdoor seating area for 60 people and a large private car park for around 80 cars.
The lease is being offered at a guide price of £80,000. In the year to March 2010 it made an adjusted net profit of £47,678.
