Market Insights · By Martin Levy · 30 April 2026
Last Tuesday I spent the best part of a morning walking a CEO and a COO around six buildings in the West End. We looked at floorplates. We talked fit-out budgets. We got a feel for light, ceiling heights, the walk from the station, the lunch options on the ground floor. Their current lease doesn’t expire until the second half of 2027. There’s no contract between us. No retainer, no exclusivity, no obligation on either side. They didn’t pay for my time and they won’t be sent a fee proposal afterwards either. On my side of the desk, we call it a taster tour.
Five years ago, what we did on Tuesday would have been considered mildly eccentric. Today, it’s genuinely one of the most useful mornings I’ll have this month.
Let me explain why the arithmetic has changed — and why, if your lease event is anywhere on the horizon, you should be thinking about doing something similar.
The best buildings are gone before most tenants start looking
Here are the numbers that should stop any finance director in their tracks. Vacancy for new, high-specification office space in Central London is now just 0.3 percent in the City Core and 0.8 percent in the West End Core (Knight Frank, The London Equation, February 2026). Forty-three percent of the 5.9 million square feet of Central London office developments due to complete in 2026 is already pre-let — committed to tenants before the buildings are even finished (Avison Young, Central London Office Analysis, Q4 2025). And across 2025 as a whole, a record 2.7 million square feet of London leasing was for space that didn’t physically exist yet — the highest volume of pre-letting since 2017 (Knight Frank, 2026).
The occupiers doing this aren’t gamblers. In 2025, Knight Frank counted fourteen separate lettings above 100,000 square feet — double the number recorded in each of the previous two years. That’s not ambition. That’s defence — these firms have worked out that the buildings their teams will actually want to come into are gone the moment they appear on the market. And the pattern is trickling down the size brackets fast.
Translation: if you wait until the last six months of your lease to pick up the phone, the buildings you actually want will already be under offer. Not “tight.” Gone. You won’t even see them on a shortlist, because by the time the shortlist gets drawn up, they belong to someone else.
A taster tour is the only way to form a real preference
Here’s the other thing I’ve learned over forty years in this market: the most expensive negotiating position a tenant can walk into is one where they’ve fallen for a building too late to walk away.
You might reasonably ask: isn’t touring eighteen months out a bit premature? My answer is that the decisions aren’t premature — the tour is. A taster tour isn’t about choosing a building. It’s about learning what “good” looks like for your business, so that when a real option crystallises you can recognise it in ten minutes rather than ten weeks.
When I take a client through a building a year or more before they need to decide anything, something useful happens. They form opinions calmly. They notice what they actually care about — is it the floorplate, the lift ratio, the natural light, the staff commute, the local amenities? — in a way that’s simply impossible when there’s a lease running out and a board paper due on Friday. By the time a real option lands on the table, they already know what “good” looks like. They know what they’re prepared to pay for it, and what they’re not.
That’s not something I can write into a fee proposal. It’s something that emerges from walking the floors together, having a coffee afterwards, and talking through what worked and what didn’t.
What a taster tour actually costs me
Nothing worth fussing about. A few hours of my time. A handful of conversations with landlords I already have on speed dial. No pitch deck, no junior staff, no marketing spend. And in return, when that client’s lease event comes around in 2027, they’ll have a shortlist shaped by months of considered thought rather than six weeks of quiet panic.
More to the point: they’ll know I work for them and only for them. Every building I showed them last Tuesday was unfiltered by whether I happened to have a letting instruction on it — because I don’t take any. That’s the thing landlord-appointed agents simply cannot offer, however well-intentioned. Tenant-only representation isn’t a tagline. It’s the whole difference.
Why nobody signs a London office lease in August
Here’s something the market talks about quietly but rarely writes down: almost no one of any seriousness signs a new London office lease in August. Boards go dark. Senior decision-makers are somewhere hot. Fit-out contractors have their diaries closed until after the summer break. If you walk into a landlord’s office on the second of August with heads of terms in hand, your paperwork will sit in an inbox until mid-September — and by then, three other tenants will have bid on the same floor.
Which means, in practice, the London commercial leasing year has a hard stop around the end of July. If a tenant wants a deal signed before the summer, heads of terms need to be on the table by early June. That implies a shortlist drawn up in May. Which implies tours — real tours, of real buildings — happening right now, in the last week of April.
I’m writing this in the last week of April. You can do the arithmetic yourself.
The question worth asking yourself
If your lease event is coming up in 2027 or 2028, here’s the question I’d put to you this quarter: when the time comes, am I going to make the decision from a position of choice, or a position of pressure?
The answer shouldn’t depend on when you feel ready to sign a retainer. It should depend on when you start learning the market. And a taster tour with me is the cheapest way in — no fee, no commitment, no catch.
Got a lease event on the horizon, even a distant one? Come on a taster tour. A morning walking real West End floors with me. No pitch deck, no junior staff, no fee proposal afterwards — just straight, tenant-only advice on where you actually stand. Call me on +44 7968 191 233, email martinl@thelevygroup.london, or come and see us at 34 South Molton Street, Mayfair.
The Levy Group London — Trusted, Valued, Respected. Independent commercial lease consultancy for London tenants, led by Martin Levy. Over 40 years of experience. More than 500 completed projects. 100% tenant-only — always.
Sources
- Knight Frank, The London Equation, 3 February 2026 — knightfrank.co.uk
- Avison Young, Central London Office Analysis, Q4 2025 — avisonyoung.co.uk
