Future of Belfast: The perfect post-Covid city?

Belfast might just be the perfect post-Covid city, according to Gareth Howell, divisional director of Savills Belfast, Mark Blair, partner at Shoosmiths and Alistair Reed, strategic director of place and economy at Belfast City Council. The trio believe the city has the potential to offer everything to a newly flexible workforce. It is a city with a huge talent base, a growing tech sector and a city where access to open countryside and a coastline is easy. And, of course, an insatiable Game of Thrones tourism allure. But like all cities, it has its challenges. The city centre has been hit hard by the Covid pandemic and more needs to be done to enable the repurposing of redundant spaces. But the city also has some unique opportunities. In a post-Brexit world, Belfast finds itself in the beneficial position of being EU-facing but within a UK regulatory framework. Here Howell, Reed and Blair discuss, as part of EG’s Future of Belfast event, why all of those things offer a real opportunity for the city. The city council’s Reed is optimistic. Not cautiously optimistic, properly optimistic for the city and its future. He doesn’t believe that the mass homeworking experiment that Covid has caused will lead to the death of cities as the centre of work and play. “I am optimistic about the future of offices and cities generally,” he says. “I mean, there’s a lot of talk about how people are going to work from home, hybrid models, all the rest of it. But for centuries, people have convened to do business in cities. Pandemics have come and gone in the past, we’ve had world wars and all the rest of it. So I’m pretty sure that given time, people will again want to convene in cities.” And if there is any city that has had its fair share of “the rest of it” to borrow Reed’s words, it is Belfast. The city bounces back. And despite the headlines that get splashed across the national media, the city is eternally attractive. “If we bring investors here, they always want to come back,” says Reed. “There’s definitely something about that vibrancy and that kind of sense of place you get when you come to Belfast that hooks people in and makes them want to come back.” Unique position Reed says that over the past 12 months, despite the pandemic, 18 new companies have come into Northern Ireland and that while historically these new entrants have taken small foothold investments in Belfast, three quarters of them have taken space that they have then grown and grown and grown. The city’s labour and operating costs, which can be between 30% and 50% lower than in other cities, are a major draw for small and large businesses alike. So, too, is its relationship with both the EU and the UK. Savills’ Howell reckons that as long as Belfast seizes the opportunity that Brexit has bestowed upon it, those inward investment figures should continue to rise. “The Brexit issue puts Northern Ireland at a real junction politically,” he says. “We find ourselves in a unique position where we can be EU-facing for companies, but we can sit within a UK regulatory framework, and that offers us a real opportunity.” Matching the demand from businesses keen to establish a base in the city and grow with the ambitions of the real estate sector is the “perfect recipe for success”, says Reed. But the city does have to be focused on harnessing the opportunities it can deliver to businesses and individuals. Doing so is going to be vital to the success of the city and its recovery from Covid. While the Brexit position is clearly one of those opportunities, so too is the city’s growing tech sector, its student population and that magnetic quality it appears to have. With London and other UK cities perhaps losing some of their appeal in an era of more flexible working, could Belfast be on the cusp of seeing an influx of professionals looking for a better quality of life? “With the investors we speak to and the companies moving into Belfast, a lot of their decisions are around quality of life,” says Shoosmiths’ Blair, who moved back home to Belfast after a stint in Birmingham. “That does seem to be a big attraction and seems to be much more in people’s minds now because of Covid than maybe it was previously. “There’s an excellent quality of life in Belfast and Northern Ireland generally, and it’s only going to get better. And that does really mean that when people come over here to invest or to live or to work, they want to stay,” he adds. “And that’s what we need long term. We need to have a certain amount of population and population growth in Belfast city centre and Belfast generally to feed everything else.” A growing city Reed, obviously, is feeling optimistic about population growth in the city. “We’ve seen, in the past five years, something like 4,500 purpose-built student accommodation units coming on stream from a base of about zero,” he says. “So, we’re going to have about 5,000 students living in the city centre that didn’t live there before. And if one-third of those come out of that accommodation every year, then you’ve got 1,700 young people looking for somewhere to stay. Now, obviously, some of them will go off to England or wherever. Some of them may well go back to Ballymena or Portrush, but many, many of them will want to stay in the city centre. So, we need to have that offer for them.” “There’s a lot to be said for the non-economic sort of situation that Belfast offers,” adds Howell. “From the city centre, you can be in countryside or what looks like countryside within 15, 20 minutes. And there’s a lot of appeal for that lifestyle and all the advantages it offers. But actually, just from a pure economic returns basis, if you look at what has happened in offices, what has happened in purpose-built student accommodation and what most likely will happen in the BTR sector, there are returns to be had here. There is empirical evidence to suggest that there is a benefit to investing in Belfast. And I think ultimately that’s what drives people.” Belfast, it seems, is a city of returns and growth, not just in cold hard numbers, but for individuals too. A place that people and business return to and a place that delivers returns. The expert panel Gareth Howell, divisional director, Savills Belfast Mark Blair, partner, Shoosmiths Alistair Reed, strategic director of place and economy, Belfast City Council To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews