Insider South West Property Awards 2024

Insider Media

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.

Transcript

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.

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