Developer Ballymore has secured funding for its £200m Three Snowhill development in Birmingham. Above: Three Snowhill Three Snowhill is a 420,000 sq ft office development in Birmingham city centre and is billed as the UK’s largest speculative city centre office scheme outside of London. It is an enterprise zone site and within Birmingham’s Snowhill Masterplan. BAM Construction, named preferred contractor back in June 2015, can now start work and is expected to complete its £90m contract by the end of 2018. M&G Real Estate has now agreed to fund the project. The deal follows M&G Real Estate’s acquisition of Two Snowhill in 2014. Ballymore chief executive Sean Mulryan said: “Ballymore is delighted to announce a start on the third and final phase of our Snowhill scheme. Working with the City, our funding partner, M&G Real Estate, and our main contractor, BAM, we will deliver a landmark building and the final element of what is one of the largest and most prestigious commercial developments in central Birmingham.” He continued: “Ballymore committed to Birmingham and the Snowhill scheme over 10 years ago. That long term commitment has resulted in the successful transformation of Snowhill into a new and thriving business district – already home to some of Birmingham’s largest office occupiers, including KPMG, Barclays, Gowling WLG (formerly Wragge & Co) and the HS2 construction headquarters. “Three Snowhill will enable us to continue building and letting large floorplate workspace of the highest quality and complete the Snowhill Estate.” M&G Real Estate chief executive Alex Jeffrey added: “Demand from both domestic and international businesses to secure high quality office space in Birmingham has significantly increased, and this is set to rise further with planned infrastructure improvements such as HS2’s Phase One confirmed to start in 2017. While occupier demand continues to outstrip supply and push prime rents upwards, Three Snowhill will benefit from low vacancy rates and support our strategy to provide our investors with long-term income-driven growth.” The concept architect for Three Snowhill is Sidell Gibson, project architect is Weedons. WSP is the structural engineer, Arup for buidling services and Gleeds is project surveyor. Further Images This article was published on 16 Mar 2016 (last updated on 16 Mar 2016). Source link

Lawyer Oliver Scoullar-Greig explains the implications of the new Public Procurement Regulations. Above: Oliver Scoullar-Greig This year has seen the introduction of the new Public Contracts Regulations, bringing many changes to public procurement, including the introduction of two new award procedures. Under the new regulations, the open and the restricted procedures, as well as the competitive dialogue procedure, are retained. However, the new regulations add the innovation partnership procedure as well as the competitive procedure with negotiation. The innovation partnership procedure has been introduced for use where the goods, works or services required are ‘innovative’ and there is an intention to include both the development and the purchase elements in the procurement. This procedure has been set up to combine the research and development stage with commercial procurement of the product. Under the previous rules, these stages generally required a separate competition processes to be held at the two stages.  The competitive procedure with negotiation, despite its new name, is actually similar to the old competitive procedure with negotiation. For most complex projects, the choice will be between the competitive dialogue procedure and the competitive procedure. This is due to there now being greater freedom to use these procedures under the new regulations. The competitive dialogue procedure can be used at an earlier stage of the development and procurement process than the competitive procedure with negotiation. The reason for this is that it permits the parties to enter into a ‘dialogue’ to work out the best ways of meeting the needs of the authority before any formal tender is issued. In this way, the authority and the market can work together to determine the scope and specifications of the project. In contrast, the competitive procedure with negotiation requires the authority to be more precise with its project objectives and specifications in order to prepare its tender with less involvement from the market. One of the problems with the competitive dialogue procedure, however, is that authorities are still required to set their award criteria before they formally enter into discussions with the market. This can mean that the criteria thought relevant at the start of the process may become less relevant by the end as the authority becomes better informed about the project and how it can best be delivered. There are of course other disadvantages and advantages associated with using each procedure and it’s important that your organisation chooses the right procedure for the project. Choosing the correct procedure is of course one of the fundamental decisions that must be made in any procurement process as a failure to do so can lead not only to unnecessary costs but also to legal challenge and the possibility of having to start the whole process over again if it is not planned correctly from the very outset.   About the author: Oliver Scoullar-Greig is a lawyer with Thomas Eggar LLP     This article was published on 31 May 2015 (last updated on 1 Jun 2015). Source link