Working from home phenomenon tailing off, claims lettings chief

The working from home revolution is showing signs of fizzling out, a leading London lettings agent has noted.

Alex McConnell (main image) who runs the lettings operation at Jackson-Stops’ Pimlico branch, says her team have seen clear signs that people are coming back to the Capital to work in their offices.

“We’ve seen a lot more people looking for pied-a-terre’s to rent in our patch so I think it’s a sign that working from home is becoming a thing of the past among more senior staff,” she says.

Pimlico is arguably the most popular of London’s neighbourhoods for pied-a-terre properties, being close to Victoria station but not as expensive as nearby upmarket areas such as Kensington or Knightbridge.

“Pied-a-terre apartments were a significant market for us but Covid closed that down and it’s only recently that we’ve seen people returning to this market as they work during the week in London but return to their country houses during the weekend, as they used to.”

Chunky

And those returning to pied-a-terre renting may get a shock – rents have risen and a ‘chunky’ one-bedroom in Pimlico currently costs approximately £2,600 a month.

Covid drove an extraordinary shift in working patterns among office employees, business sector figures revealed recently. This included that the number of those working from home to one degree or another has risen from 4.7% of the workforce in 2019 to 46.6% by April 2020.

Companies both large and small have been issuing increasingly aggressive ‘return to work’ directives in recent months even though flexibility matters significantly to workers, with a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development survey finding that six percent of employees changed jobs last year due to a lack of flexible work options.

Speaking during Jackson-Stops annual associates’ summer gathering, McConnell also said that despite the general election and poor weather recently, the summer lettings market had “started in earnest”.