BTG Eddisons has bolstered its Liverpool property agency team with the appointment of an experienced industry figure, a move that on the surface reads as routine personnel news but which, on closer inspection, offers a useful barometer of where regional property consultancies see growth in the current market. The national firm, which combines chartered surveying, valuation and agency services with a substantial insolvency and asset advisory practice, has been steadily expanding its regional footprint outside London and the South East, and Liverpool has emerged as one of its priority markets for 2024 and beyond.
This matters to UK property investors for reasons beyond the immediate personnel change. Consultancy firms do not expand headcount in a city speculatively; they do so because deal flow, client instructions and transaction volumes justify the investment. Liverpool's commercial property market has shown resilience through a difficult two years for the sector nationally, with prime office yields in the city centre holding at around 7.5-8%, meaningfully higher than the sub-6% yields still commanded in London and Manchester, making it an increasingly attractive proposition for investors chasing income return in a higher interest rate environment. Industrial and logistics stock along the M62 corridor and around the docks has also continued to attract institutional capital, with take-up in the Liverpool City Region industrial market running well above the ten-year average through much of 2023.
The broader context here is the divergence opening up between the so-called Northern Powerhouse cities. Manchester has arguably reached a plateau in terms of yield compression, with prime office and residential development pricing now closer to parity with parts of outer London, prompting some investors to look further afield. Liverpool, by contrast, still offers a discount of perhaps 20-30% on comparable commercial assets in Manchester city centre, while benefiting from many of the same regeneration tailwinds — a growing knowledge economy anchored by the universities, continued investment in the Baltic Triangle and Ten Streets creative quarters, and the long-promised but now progressing Liverpool Waters scheme. Leeds and Birmingham present their own distinct investment cases, built respectively around financial and professional services relocation and the HS2-adjacent development pipeline, but neither currently offers the same relative value entry point that Liverpool does.
For buy-to-let landlords and residential investors, the read-across is equally instructive. Liverpool has consistently ranked among the highest gross rental yield cities in the UK, with postcodes such as L1 and L7 regularly delivering yields above 8%, well ahead of the 4-5% typical in London and the South East, and even ahead of Manchester's compressed residential yields. Strengthened agency capability in the city — spanning both commercial and, by extension, the investment sales that underpin much of the buy-to-let supply chain — tends to correlate with improved transaction transparency and pricing discipline, which benefits landlords seeking to acquire or dispose of portfolios at fair value rather than through opaque off-market channels.
Developers should also take note. A strengthened local agency presence typically precedes, rather than follows, an uptick in development activity, since consultancies position senior staff where they anticipate future instructions on site disposals, pre-lets and forward funding deals. Liverpool's development pipeline currently includes significant office refurbishment activity responding to occupier demand for higher-grade, ESG-compliant space, alongside a build-to-rent sector that remains underdeveloped relative to Manchester's, suggesting room for further institutional entrants over the next 12 to 18 months. First-time buyers in the city, meanwhile, continue to benefit from house prices that sit at roughly 40% of the England and Wales average multiple of earnings, though affordability pressures are beginning to build as investor demand pushes up entry-level pricing in the most sought-after regeneration areas.
Looking ahead, the direction of travel is reasonably clear. Regional consultancies are repositioning senior talent toward cities where relative value, yield and regeneration momentum combine most favourably, and Liverpool currently ticks each of those boxes more convincingly than most comparable UK cities. Commercial investors and developers who move in the next year, before pricing catches up with Manchester's, stand to capture the more attractive end of the risk-return curve. Landlords and first-time buyers should expect rental and capital growth to accelerate modestly rather than dramatically, constrained by affordability ceilings, but the underlying trajectory for Liverpool's property market over the coming year points firmly upward.
