Commercial sales top £1bn

Allsop raised £117.8m at its last commercial auction of 2016, with a success rate of 76% from 224 lots offered. The result means that the commercial auctions sector as a whole has raised more than £1bn this year. This is the first time it has reached this figure since the market peaked in 2007. The total number of lots sold in Allsop’s two-day sale was 171, with around £30m raised from property sold prior to auction. The firm has now topped £600m from commercial auctions this year, which is around £130m more than in 2015. Auctioneer Duncan Moir said: “It was an absolutely cracking finish to the year. There was a good appetite in the room. We raised more than we expected – we thought it would be between £100m and £110m.” However, he acknowledged that there was “some softness in regional areas where the pricing was aspirational”. The largest lot was a parade of four shops with flats above in Kentish Town, NW5, which sold for £4m off a guide of £3.8m-£4m. Another parade of shops, in Reigate, Surrey, guided at £2.9m-£3m, sold for £3.2m. From a guide price of £2.1m, a car park near Heathrow Airport sold for £3.1m. Two day nurseries in Cheshire sold for £2.2m and £1.3m respectively. A ground-floor shop rented by Tesco Express in Croydon, south London, was included in a lot that sold for £1.1m. Two sites on industrial parks in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, were bought for two and four times the guide price respectively. A three-floor building in Woodbridge, Suffolk, with the ground floor rented to Lloyds Bank and an annual income of £59,000, was sold for £1.1m. The sale took place at the Berkeley Hotel, SW1, on 5 and 6 December. Breaking the £1bn barrier – with more to come With December sales including Acuitus and Pugh & Company (both 8 December) and Barnett Ross (14 December) still to be factored into the 2016 total, the commercial auction market has already broken through the £1bn barrier (see comment). Sales had totalled more than £969m from 32 auctions up to the end of November, according to Essential Information Group. Commercial auctions came close to £1bn in 2014, when the total was £996m, but last year’s total fell to £971m.