08.04.09

Financial Institutions Relocating to London

Posted in Ads, Business Performance, Life + Real Estate at 11:28 am

East London was a popular locality for banks when many of them started moving their offices to the Canary Wharf area. Over the last two decades the Isle of Dogs became a strong competitor to the City’s commercial district in this respect.

Now the trend in favour of Canary Wharf seems to be dwindling as Nomura, a Japanese Financial Corporation said recently that it is planning to shift to London. According to the company management, London is a more impressive location and will be a better option for attracting as well as serving their international clients.

It intends to lease Watermark Place, which will be spread over an area of 525,000 sq ft of top grade open plan shared office space, and is currently under construction near the Thames. This will mean that they will relocate their biggest office in the UK, resulting in more than four thousand staff members to shift as well.

Recently Morgan Stanley had also announced that it is going to shift out of Canary Wharf even though they will need to terminate their lease early in order to do so.

Trying to explain the reason for this shift, a property firm CB Richard Ellis commented on the situation saying the property rent in Canary Wharf has gone down at a lesser rate in comparison with London and Mayfair. Thus the shift may be the result of changes in real estate market that have taken place in London in the last two years – click for info on offices to rent London.

The state of the real estate market in the area may start hurting it soon though there are no clear cut indications as yet of such a trend. Nevertheless, no one will deny that this is bad news for Canary Wharf.

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