Demand Barometer: What occupiers want – December 2024

Retail has extended its lead over industrial as the UK’s most enquired-after commercial use type, according to exclusive data from EG’s Propertylink listings site. The Propertylink data offers a breakdown showing the sectors and locations that have generated the highest proportion of enquiries over the course of December. Sector overview The figures for December show that retail enquiries made through the listings site accounted for 45.4% of all enquiries across the three major use types, up two percentage points on the November share. This gives retail a 3.3 point lead over industrial, up from the more slender 1.3 point lead it had in November, when it overtook industrial for the first time in 2024. Office enquiries accounted for just 12.5% of the total, which was the sector’s lowest percentage in any month of 2024. Industrial, meanwhile, remained level with its November share of 42.1%.   Sector demand by region Greater London remains the most popular region for enquiries on Propertylink for both office and retail properties, accounting for a respective 25.2% and 20.4% of all enquiries made for those sectors across the UK, excluding Northern Ireland. However, its lead over the South East, which is its next-nearest competitor in these sectors, has been cut to 0.8 points in offices and just 0.1 point in retail, which is a significant narrowing on the figures for the preceding month. Perhaps the most dramatic regional shift, however, came in industrial. The South East had been the most enquired-after region for industrial for every month in 2024, but December saw attention shift to the East of England, which generated more industrial enquiries than anywhere else, at 19.8% of the total.   Regional cities Excluding London, Glasgow and Edinburgh remain the cities most enquired about via Propertylink, although the former’s lead over the latter has been cut to just 0.3 percentage points, which is by some distance the smallest that gap has been all year. Both cities saw decreases in share compared with November, down to 13.1% and 12.8% respectively. Perhaps the biggest winner in the December figures was Leicester, which shot into third place on an 11.6% share of enquiries. In February, its share was as low as 5.2% and its December performance represents a 4.5 point jump even on its November total.     Key movers Not only was December a good month for Leicester but Leeds managed to achieve its second highest share of Propertylink enquiries of the year to date, and the two cities rose above Birmingham to push the UK’s second city into fifth place overall. Birmingham’s share of 7.6% was its lowest since February. It was a good month for the Yorkshire region as not only did Leeds put in an impressive performance but Sheffield and Bradford were up on their shares in November. In the North West, Manchester went up as Liverpool went down, and there was a similarly mixed picture in the Midlands, where Coventry saw an increase in share while Nottingham saw the opposite. It was a bad month on the south coast, where Southampton, Portsmouth and Brighton all saw decreases in their share of enquiries. Further north, Bristol was down by two points on the preceding month while Cambridge was up. North of the border, Aberdeen saw its strongest performance of the year, with a share of 3.9%.   EG’s demand insights are powered by activity across our industry-leading commercial property listings platform – Propertylink Main photo © Analogicus/Pixabay