Voice of the Region: South Wales – Enter the dragon

South Wales is building back from the pandemic with a raft of industrial start-ups and with leisure operators keen to fill vacant space on the high street, believes Fletcher Morgan associate Matthew Jones.

Fletcher Morgan is the highest placed regional independent agency in the Radius On Demand Rankings for South Wales with 338,699 sq ft of space transacted across 40 deals so far this year. Jones, meanwhile, has done the third most individual deals (22) for the whole of Wales, with only Knight Frank’s Neil Francis and Mark Sutton having done more.

Jones says the office market has been the toughest in living memory but is starting to spring back to life, albeit with occupiers less interested in conventional leases. Small industrial units, meanwhile, are selling in their droves to local occupiers and the industrial estates of South Wales are now high on the priority lists of investment funds. Meanwhile, a variety of leisure occupiers are setting up in the high street, helped by the fact some 20% of the population of Cardiff are students.