RHM Commercial has announced that its turnover increased 15% for the year to the end of March 2010 compared to last year.
Nick Rose commented:
“This is a very pleasing result in an extremely challenging property market and reflects the hard work of our whole team and the loyalty of our expanding client base.
In particular, our strong reputation for saving clients money by fighting rent reviews and appealing rating assessments has resulted in a lot of new business over the past 12 months – in most cases these new clients have been referred to us by existing clients and other professionals. Also, we are finding that businesses that previously dealt with rent reviews and lease renewals in-house now recognise the need to employ experts to control their property costs.
A period of uncertainty does, of course, create opportunities for active asset management and we are currently negotiating rent reductions, extended rent-free periods and other concessions for our tenant clients in return for taking new leases, extensions to existing leases and dropping break clauses that are approaching.
On the agency side of our business, we continue to act for retailers in the convenience food and discount sectors who are taking advantage of current market conditions to acquire additional trading space on extremely favourable terms.”
Ciaran Hughes confirmed that “we are still letting offices to companies attracted to Northern Ireland by low property costs and our high quality labour force. In addition, we have been targeting local companies who can potentially move into better office space at a lower rent than they are currently paying – a classic ‘win win’ situation.”
Ciaran also commented that “we have recently been appointed as joint letting agents on a number of office schemes where the landlords want to create competition with their existing agent and ensure they have every chance to snare potential tenants. The days of putting up a board and waiting for the phone to ring are long gone – nowadays we pro-actively approach companies whose leases are coming to an end and put a relocation proposal on the table. This allows the company to quickly undertake a cost benefit analysis of the business case for moving.”
