22/12/2025
Regional Managing Director Gavin Hynes takes stock of the firm’s agency experience of the commercial property market as we face the new year & looks back at some of the ‘star’ deals of the past year.
The business world began 2025 with a UK 2024 Budget hangover and the same geopolitical uncertainties since Russia’s wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The prospect of a restrictive trade tariff regime and the protectionist swing of an incoming White House administration added a new twist.
It could seem like a ‘cut & paste’ job as we enter 2026 - although business has now learned to factor in the US tariff regime as a ‘known unknown’ given the unpredictability of presidential pronouncements.
On paper then, both 2025 and 2026 had - and have - gloomy outlooks in accommodating micro and macro-economic forces. Yet Eddisons’ agency experience in our East and East Midlands region during 2025 serves as a counterpoint when we look at our transaction numbers.
Q1: start as we mean to go on
In the first quarter of 2025 we reported activity levels - that’s the number of sales and lettings agreed - as being up 10 per cent on the same period of the previous year which, in turn, was up on 2023’s Q1 figure.
It’s a level of activity that continued during every quarter of 2025 to the point where we are - once the numbers have been crunched - looking to report activity level across the whole of 2025 as 10 per cent up on 2024 which was, itself, roughly 10 per cent up on 2023.
In a time of little ‘churn’, in the industry parlance - and we’re not alone among our peer agents in describing the market as ‘challenging and exacting’ - every deal is fought for and hard won through to completion in best representing clients’ interests.
A view of the markets
Looking at the mainstream commercial sectors in which we have been active in 2025, without question it’s the industrial sector that continues to turn in a stellar performance when it comes to activity.
Positioned with agency offices in the key A1(M), A14 and onwards to the M6 & M1 corridors, we capitalise on the East Midlands ‘Golden Triangle’ where logistics and supply chain operators set the tone from the big sheds feeding down through to the trade counters operated by the big merchants and the supporting SMEs.
In Leicester, we acquired the freehold interest of a 10.5 acre industrial site with premises of circa 170,000 sq ft of accommodation in Thurmaston on behalf of a client. The site & premises were being marketed for sale with a guide price of £6 million earlier in the year.
With a limited market for the sale of a site with the industrial legacy of metal recycling, our Kettering agency sold the freehold of the 2.19-acre site on Corby’s Willowbrook Industrial Estate in the first half of the year for in excess of its guide price on marketing of £1.5 million.
In Boston, Lincolnshire, we acted in joint agency on behalf of a client in securing the sale of a Grade A food processing facility of 122,000 sq ft on a 14 acres site, plus 51 acres of farmland - on the market for offers in excess of £3.8 million - to a major national operator in the food sector.
Acting on behalf of a global investment fund, we sold a 180,000 sq ft warehouse freehold on Southgate Way in Peterborough’s long-established commercial district of Orton Southgate.
The freehold sale of the former WATA (West Anglia Training Authority) campus site in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire was concluded just over three months after Eddisons being appointed as the sole agent instructed as part of the planned disposal of the 4.87 acre site. With 21,496 sq ft of mixed office & training buildings and 19,098 sq ft of warehouse/workshop accommodation there were several interested parties in both the whole and various elements of the site, but the sale was to a single purchaser.
In the context of what remains a ‘quiet’ office market when it comes to moves by companies, 2025 has seen a keen appetite for office building freeholds when they become available.
A two storey, 1,587 sq ft office property with planning to convert to residential in popular neighbourhood one mile north of Cambridge’s historic city centre went to best bids and the freehold was sold for over the guide price of £450,000.
A significant office deal in Peterborough city centre in 2025, saw the agency act on behalf of the owner in the successful freehold sale of the 28,520 sq ft Monkstone House office building on City Road.
Acting on behalf of University of Leicester, we disposed of the freehold interest in an educational facility in the city following six weeks of marketing when the property had originally been on the market for circa two years prior to Eddisons getting involved. The sale concluded by way of the auction method using SDL Property Auctions, who are part of Eddisons, for £1.56m.
A good sized letting in the context of the 2025 Cambridge market for office and laboratory space saw a pioneering firm in the field of solid barocaloric materials for cooling & heating technologies & applications take 9,695 sq ft in wanting to be located within the Cambridge Science Park sphere of influence on the northern edge of the city.
In general, however, the mid-tech, labs and R&D slice of this market has seen a falling off as the shape of final US tariff agreements reinforced pharmaceutical sector uncertainties.
Retail & leisure - including food & beverage - remain a very mixed picture in our regional patch, as it does across the country and has done so for a number of years.
The fallout from 2024’s Budget measures on employer NI contributions, minimum wage increases and the Employment Rights Bill during 2025, combined with cost of living pressures on consumers, all acutely play out in this frontline sector.
But, where operators can get their offer as right as their location - for instance, in ‘pretty’ hot spot market towns and locations accessible to a strong demographic catchment area - deals are done.
Location, location, location
Stamford has remained a retail ‘hotspot’ during 2025 and Eddisons acted as the letting agent when 44 High Street in the market town - the former Wilko unit - was extensively re-modelled by a private property developer client to become two self-contained retail units. The result was clothing brand Weird Fish taking the lease of the newly created standalone, ground floor unit, 44b, and Magnet with its new showroom across two floors at the new unit 44a.
Bury St Edmunds, similarly, is a retail hot-spot shared among independent operators as well as those more established high street names.
Lincoln’s historic city centre has seen a wholesale transformation in the past few years on the back of substantial investment centred on its retail and leisure offer around the Cornhill Quarter.
At Exchange Arcade at the heart of this city centre scheme, we acted as agent in the successful letting of the former Superdry/Goddards unit, to leading, premium fashion & goods brand Oliver Bonas and terms agreed on another unit within the scheme to a second high-end brand with a similar offer who had expressed initial interest in the first unit.
In acting for the landlord, a 9,775 sq ft unit at Welland Business Park, Market Harborough saw soft play centre, Rascal Ranch with a new second location to add to its first centre in Leicester.
The premises in terms of size, accessibility and parking, as well as the demographic profile of its catchment area, meant the independent operator extending its business offer with on-site catering for its own patrons as well as customers and occupiers of the wider business park.
Location is key and there can be transactions in secondary retail locations - such as neighbourhood parades or well-located retail parks - when the numbers stack up for occupiers.
As consumers, we all have direct and regular encounters with retail & leisure. It’s a sector which is seen as a weathervane in judging the wider business picture. In 2026 it’s the sector that, arguably, will be first to face a reckoning with the new Business Rates Revaluation regime coming in to effect from April.
Looking towards 2026
With 2026’s adjustments based on rateable values of rental markets in spring 2024, it’ll be a mixed picture of rises and falls. However, it’s one that will, undoubtedly, affect some smaller businesses negatively.
For Eddisons’ own part in being a business conducting deals and transactions as a corporate entity within Begbies Traynor Group PLC, it’s been another busy year.
In the final month of 2025, we expanded our agency presence across the South East with the acquisition of Kirkby Diamond - a regional consultancy with offices in Milton Keynes, Bedford, Luton, St Albans and Enfield. This deal quickly followed Eddisons acquiring Network Auctions - a London firm - to extend our firm’s property auction capability in the South of England.
It’s no coincidence that our level of corporate activity on the acquisitions front in 2025 has underpinned the activity levels of Eddisons’ property agency in expanding our business reach and service offer to increase our market share.
For us, as for many of our clients who have pushed through 2025, it’s been a long term strategic outlook at corporate level that has seen the necessity of scaling-up to build business resilience.
As we look not only to 2026 but also to the final years of this decade and ‘unknown unknowns’, now - more than ever - it’s a business truth that only the resilient will prosper.
This article is reproduced by kind permission of Business Weekly. in which a version recently appeared as part of the publication’s monthly ‘Scaling up in association with Eddisons’ feature.
