2025 saw the resilient thrive & the same’s in the mix for 2026
The business world began 2025 with a UK 2024 Budget hangover and the same geopolitical uncertainties since Russia’s wholesale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The prospect of a restrictive trade tariff regime and the protectionist swing of an incoming White House administration added a new twist.
It could seem like a ‘cut & paste’ job as we enter 2026 - although business has now learned to factor in the US tariff regime as a ‘known unknown’ given the unpredictability of presidential pronouncements.
On paper then, both 2025 and 2026 had and have gloomy outlooks in accommodating micro and macro-economic forces.
Yet Eddisons’ agency experience in our East and East Midlands region during 2025 serves as a counterpoint when we look at our transaction numbers.
In the first quarter of 2025 we reported activity levels - that’s the number of sales and lettings agreed - as being up 10 per cent on the same period of the previous year which, in turn, was up on 2023’s Q1 figure.
It’s a level of activity that continued during every quarter of 2025 to the point where we are – once the numbers have been crunched – looking to report activity level across the whole of 2025 as 10 per cent up on 2024 which was, itself, roughly 10 per cent up on 2023.
In a time of little ‘churn’, in the industry parlance – and we’re not alone among our peer agents in describing the market as ‘challenging and exacting’ - every deal is fought for and hard won through to completion in best representing clients’ interests.
Looking at the mainstream commercial sectors in which we have been active in 2025, without question it’s the industrial sector that continues to turn in a star performance when it comes to activity.
Positioned with agency offices in the key A1(M), A14 and onwards to the M6 & M1 corridors, we capitalise on the East Midlands ‘Golden Triangle’ where logistics and supply chain operators set the tone from the big sheds feeding down through to the trade counters operated by the big merchants and the supporting SMEs.
In the context of what remains a ‘quiet’ office market when it comes to moves by companies, 2025 has seen a keen appetite for office building freeholds when they become available. The mid-tech, labs and R&D slice of this market has seen a falling off as the shape of final US tariff agreements reinforced pharmaceutical sector uncertainties.
Retail & leisure - including food & beverage - remain a very mixed picture in our regional patch, as it does across the country and has done so for a number of years.
The fallout from 2024’s Budget measures on employer NI contributions, minimum wage increases and the Employment Rights Bill during 2025, combined with cost of living pressures on consumers, all acutely play out in this frontline sector.
But, where operators can get their offer as right as their location - for instance, in ‘pretty’ hot spot market towns accessible to a strong demographic catchment area - deals are done. Location is key and there can be transactions in secondary retail locations - such as neighbourhood parades or well-located retail parks - when the numbers stack up for occupiers.
As consumers, we all have direct and regular encounters with retail & leisure. It’s a sector which is seen as a weathervane in judging the wider business picture. In 2026 it’s the sector that, arguably, will be first to face a reckoning with the new Business Rates Revaluation regime coming in to effect from April.
With 2026’s adjustments based on rateable values of rental markets in spring 2024, it’ll be a mixed picture of rises and falls. However, it’s one that will, undoubtedly, affect some smaller businesses negatively.
For Eddisons’ own part in being a business conducting deals and transactions as a corporate entity within Begbies Traynor Group PLC, it’s been another busy year.
In the final month of 2025, we expanded our agency presence across the South East with the acquisition of Kirkby Diamond - a regional consultancy with offices in Milton Keynes, Bedford, Luton, St Albans and Enfield. This deal quickly followed Eddisons acquiring Network Auctions - a London firm – to extend our firm’s property auction capability in the South of England.
It’s no coincidence that our level of corporate activity on the acquisitions front in 2025 has underpinned the activity levels of Eddisons’ property agency in expanding our business reach and service offer to increase our market share.
For us, as for many of our clients who have pushed through 2025, it’s been a long term strategic outlook at corporate level that has seen the necessity of scaling-up to build business resilience.
As we look not only to 2026 but also to the final years of this decade and ‘unknown unknowns’, now - more than ever - it’s a business truth that only the resilient will prosper.
