Niche real estate and distribution specialists, B8 Real Estate (B8RE), has been appointed sole agent for what it describes as the biggest speculative industrial development on Merseyside for years.
Developer New Capital Knowsley will start work next month on its Venus 110 project, a 110,000sq ft distribution facility at the entrance to Knowsley Industrial Park. Supported by a £1m European Regional Development Fund grant, the 6.5-acre scheme will be completed by the middle of next year.
“The North West has a severe shortage of new distribution facilities,” said B8RE director Howard George. “The take-up within this sector over the past three years has been at record levels, with not a single building of over 100,000 sq ft being built in the North West corridor between Liverpool to Manchester.
“The completion of Venus 110, which also contains 10,000 sq ft of office space, will offer much needed accommodation for expanding companies that do not have the time to wait for a design and build solution,” he added.
According to its recently published North West Industrial and Logistics Market Report, B8RE claims that there was no new industrial stock available in prime North West sites for the first half of 2014, restricting transactions to existing stock.
“A growing amount of imminent speculative development is now in the pipeline,” the report says, “which is set to the meet investment appetite that has seen 2014 first half investment volumes hit £230m — double that of the same period in 2013.”
The report shows there were more than £200m of industrial assets sold or under offer since the start of July, with the majority of demand focussed on assets worth in excess of £4m. The average deal so far for the second half of 2014 is around £8m.
A second speculative logistics scheme has also joined the race to win warehouse deals in Merseyside ahead of the opening of the Liverpool 2 container terminal at Port of Liverpool.
Barwood Developments (North) Ltd has acquired a factory site at Huyton Business Park, for £5.2m and has announced plans to speculatively redevelop the site with a state-of-the-art 204,000sq ft warehousing facility.
The site’s existing 174,198 sq ft manufacturing plant is let to Goodrich Actuation Systems Limited for the supply of aeroplane parts to clients such as Airbus. Its operation will close by mid-2015 when Barwood will move in to redevelop the 9.39-acre plot.
Andrew Dickman is a director at Barwood. “The site is positioned adjacent to a busy motorway junction and we believe that our proposals will generate strong demand in a recovering market where there is now a serious lack of supply of good quality industrial and warehousing stock,” he said.
