Insider speaks with winners at this year’s South West Property Awards held in Bristol about the the current position of the region’s property market and where their focus lies for the coming 12 months.
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00:00Hello, Chris here from Southwest Business Insider. I'm here backstage at the Southwest
00:14Property Awards 2024. The event is our annual celebration of the region's commercial property
00:19sector and we're here to really recognize and honor the great and the good from the
00:25industry across 13 different categories ranging from architect of the year to developer of
00:30the year and our much coveted property personality of the year award. Now, it's been an interesting
00:3612 months in the sector here in the Southwest and with that in mind, I've called some of
00:41our guests to see what they think about this sector at the moment and their optimism for
00:46the future. So, Nigel Dyke, consultant of Alec French Architects and this year, of course,
00:52one of our big successes has been the Bristol Beacon. There aren't many opportunities in
00:58the world to put a 21st century concert hall inside a 19th century concert hall and that
01:04clearly has been a really significant project for us this year. It's part of a variety of
01:10projects that we do across Bristol and the region. My name is Tim Wielden. I'm managing
01:18director of Zeal Hotels. We are developing what will probably be the most sustainable
01:24hotel in the world, both from an operational point of view and from a construction point
01:29of view and we have been liaising with and working with Southwest companies throughout
01:34this period, which has been, from my point of view, the dream has been 14, 15 years.
01:40We have actually been working about five years now on the design for the hotel and it will
01:47be a remarkable hotel at the end of the day and we're looking forward to opening it in
01:51January or next year. My name is Rebecca Cook. I'm a chartered surveyor and head of valuation
01:58at Vickery Holman. We're a firm of chartered surveyors and property consultants based across
02:02the Southwest with offices in Truro, Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol. Having joined my company
02:09as a graduate surveyor and having progressed through the ranks from chartered surveyor
02:13to now senior associate and head of valuation at the firm, I think it's an incredibly exciting
02:18sector to be a part of and one which my company in particular very much supports young people.
02:24We have 14 graduates currently at the company and I think it's an incredibly exciting opportunity
02:29for young people. I think it's quite a difficult market at the moment. I think that Bristol
02:36seems to suffer from a mixture of popularity and also quite an expensive land value and
02:47construction costs so that actually it's quite difficult sometimes to deliver projects and I
02:54think that needs to play out over the next couple of years. I do know that there is a
03:01considerable demand, greater demand now for hotel accommodation within the Southwest,
03:06particularly post-COVID and this is something which we are going to be looking at helping
03:13with. Although the hotel that we are at the moment building and designing and constructing
03:18will be a leisure hotel. It's going to be a four-star hotel. It's going to be commercial
03:23and leisure based but it's going to be transitioned. We are just off the M5, we're
03:29at Exeter Science Park which is a becoming science park. It's great, it's getting bigger
03:33all the time and it's very close to the airport as well. Beyond that, we're also looking now at
03:40ZL2, ZL3, ZL4, ZL5 and various other locations within the UK. Exeter is the prototype and we
03:49have drawn a line in the sand in terms of design and what we're going to be doing within that
03:56particular hotel operationally. ZL2, ZL3, ZL4, ZL5 will actually be even more sustainable at the
04:03end of the day and we are looking at developing the ZL brand if you like further, not only in
04:09the UK but also abroad in mainland Europe and also elsewhere.