Interactions within the office market cycle in Great Britain

This article adopts an unrestricted vector autoregressive framework methodology to examine the cyclical activity of office property development in Great Britain. The empirical analysis provides supporting evidence for the significant influence of office rents on the rate of new office construction. Service sector output has a small impact on office development, whereas the results do not establish a relationship with employment and interest rates. The significance of rents is attributed to the tenure characteristics of the market and the important role of developers and property investors in initiating office projects in Great Britain. A period of up to three years appears to be the optimum period between the time that rental signals are generated and the time that buildings are put in place, as a response to those signals.