9th March 2015

Baldwin Street building sold for retail and luxury residential redevelopment

A prominent mixed use building on Bristol’s Baldwin Street has been sold to premium residential development company Westcoast Developments, a Bournemouth-based developer renowned for its luxury homes on Poole’s world-famous Sandbanks Peninsular and surrounding areas of Dorset.  

28 Baldwin Street, a nine storey property which offers leisure accommodation at basement, ground, first and second floors, and serviced offices on the upper five floors, will be redeveloped once lease agreements with serviced office occupiers have expired. 

Westcoast Developments are currently speaking to interested parties regarding vacant basement and ground floor commercial space, covering an area of over 8,000 sq ft.  This city centre prime retail space is ideal for restaurant, coffee shop, gym or retail store with its dedicated lift between ground and basement floors and car parking facility. 

The upper floors currently operate as Maxet House serviced office centre.  The longest running lease will expire in September 2015, at which point Westcoast Developments plan to redevelop the accommodation to create approximately 50 luxury residential apartments under its Westone brand.  Westone apartments are beautifully designed and incorporate a range of innovative space-saving solutions for modern living.

The 39,000 sq ft property, which benefits from a self-contained 15 space car park nearby, is the latest in a line of secondary city centre office buildings to be allocated for residential conversion under PDR, a temporary relaxation of the planning rules allowing office to residential conversion. 

There is now a pipeline of over 1 million sq ft of office accommodation in Bristol awaiting conversion.

Property consultancy Alder King secured the freehold sale of the property off a quoting price of £2 million on behalf of the Lewis Group and Kurt Wyman. 

Tom Dugay, office agent at Alder King, said: “Over the past two years, we’ve seen increased demand from developers for Bristol’s older office buildings, primarily for student and private residential redevelopment.   With this property we had nationwide interest from developers and were able to secure a strong sale price.

“Under current PDR legislation, developers only have until May 2016 to complete their schemes and, with a few exceptions, many will struggle to meet this deadline.  

Given the impetus and investment PDR has given the city’s office market, it will be interesting to see if the Government extends the scheme and therefore the May 2016 deadline in the Budget later this month.”

Enquiries for the leisure/retail accommodation should be directed to Westcoast Developments on 01202 545999.