The Olympics Property Blog

The last seats were being removed from the London 2012 Olympics Basketball Arena this week.

The 12,000-seater venue saw both the USA's men's and women's teams win gold in Summer with victories over Spain and France respectively in the Olympic Basketball finals.

The London Legacy Development Corporation's contractor is now well underway on dismantling the stadium with the images below showing the last seats being removed.

Some 3,000 of the seats are being reused for the new Lee Valley Hockey and Tennis Centre that the LLDC is building on the site of Eton Manor which hosted wheelchair tennis during the Games

A further 7,000 seats have been sold while the remaining 2,000 seats being made available to the rental market.

The shell of the venue is going back to Barr Construction that owns it.

The Olympic Basketball arena had been due to go to Rio de Janeiro to be used in the 2016 Olympics, but Rio chiefs concluded that it was not the most cost effective plan going forward.

Work started on removing the temporary venue in October.

The Basketball Arena, sitting between the Velodrome and the Athletes Village, will be completely removed by summer 2013, allowing work to begin in its place on Chobham Manor - the first neighbourhood to be built in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Chobham Manor will be around 850 new homes, 70% of which will be family homes. The first homes will be ready at the end of 2014.

The Basketball Arena is one of three temporary venues being removed from Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park by the LLDC.

The others are the Riverbank Arena - used for Hockey - which has already been removed and the Legacy Corporation has begun work to remove the Waterpolo Arena.

The ridiculousness of empty property rates came into sharp focus this week after I revealed that the Olympic Park has an £18m liability to the "Bombsite Britain" tax.

The charge would be the largest in the history of the tax since it was introduced in 1966.

Luckily it looks like the London Legacy Development Corporation might successfully be able to reduce its liability.

It is holding talks with the Valuation Office Agency over paying rates only on the likes of the construction cabins while a £292m redevelopment takes place over the next 18 months.

But developers and landlords are not always so lucky.

According to Lambert Smith Hampton's national head of rating, Richard Wackett, most redevelopments still incur charges for areas that are considered "capable of use" effectively meaning areas that aren't having work done during a project, you still pay for.

The Olympic Park was given its £37.5m rateable value prior to the Olympics.

Questions will be asked as to why it was deemed rateable in the first place given that it would close again six weeks later for its revamp.

As Knight Frank's head of business rates Keith Cooney put it: "The Park had a functional obsolescence built in which would seem to render it incapable of being let under the assumed rating criteria of a year to year tenancy with a prospect of continuance.

"If the Park was rateable over such a short period then why were the other sites not also rated like the beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade or the horse trials in Greenwich."

But the key issue here has to be that given the financial crisis of recent years, how can the Government still be levying a tax that is such a blatant hindrance on growth and development.

Empty property rates have earned the nickname the Bombsite Britain tax after forcing landlords to flatten thousands of empty buildings to avoid paying it.

The tax is a blight on regeneration charging landlords for simply owning a vacant property.

Nobody wants to own a vacant property. The money spent on the tax could be spent on redevelopment instead.

But there is hope.

Four recommendations to make empty rates more business friendly have been passed to the Treasury by a working group of MPs tasked with providing evidence of the damaging effects of the tax.

Ministers are now weighing up whether to adopt the recommendations ahead of a potential announcement in the Autumn Statement on 5 December.

Everyone in the property industry should be crossing their fingers and toes...

The London 2012 Olympic Stadium may not re-open to the public until after the next Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, legacy chiefs have admitted.

New chief executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation Dennis Hone told the London Assembly that the stadium would not reopen until August 2015 at the earliest.

But, if West Ham United are selected as a tenant of the stadium, Hone said it will be more like August 2016 before it reopens, around the time of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Hone told the London Assembly that the LLDC was exploring various design options to convert the stadium to meet the specifications of the four bidders to become tenants of the arena.

The most complex option is unlikely to be completed until the start of the football season in August 2016.

Hone also denied reports that the stadium could be home to an American Football team, saying no formal bid had been received, and no approach had been made outside of the bidding process.

Neale Coleman, the Mayor of London's director of London 2012 co-ordination, confirmed that the estimated 9.3m annual visitors to the Olympic Park in the future presumed up to 2m from the presence of a Premier League football club.

John Biggs, chairman of the Assembly's budget and performance committee, said: "It's disappointing to hear of more delay to the Olympic Stadium legacy.

"Regardless of who gets the stadium, a huge amount of work will need to be done before it can reopen to the public. Over the next three or four years, the LLDC will have to face that extra cost while coping with lost rent and lower visitor numbers on the Olympic Park.

"In the longer-term, questions remain about who will pay for improvements to the Park and whether the LLDC has access to the kind of sums needed to pay for new infrastructure - like schools and health centres - without raiding the public purse."

The full London Assembly will question the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, as chairman of the LLDC, at a public meeting at City Hall on Wednesday 14 November.

The London Legacy Development Corporation has released an online guide to inform how the Olympic Park will change over the next 10 months called noordinarypark.co.uk.

People can be kept up to date about about plans for new homes, jobs and business opportunities, cultural events and attractions by signing up via the website.

The Olympic Park has now closed for a £292m redevelopment following the Olympics and Paralympics, but it will begin reopening from 27 July 2013.

The £292m transformation programme will clear the Games-time structures including temporary venues, bridges, walkways and roads; connect the Park to the surrounding area with new roads, cycle and foot paths; and complete permanent venues, bridges and parklands ready for residents' and visitors' everyday use.

Starting in the North Park, the first venue to reopen will be the Copper Box, with the whole of the North Park including the VeloPark, a new outdoor cycle circuit and mountain bike trail, and Lee Valley Tennis and Hockey Centre opening by the end of 2013.

This will be followed by the South Park from spring 2014 which will be home to the South Plaza, a dynamic public space that will welcome crowds to the Park with entertainment and attractions.

LLDC interim chief executive Dennis Hone said: "The park's fantastic venues will give people the chance to follow in the footsteps of our great Olympians and Paralympians.

"By visiting Noordinarypark.co.uk they can see exactly how the park will be adapted, what the venues and open spaces will be used for and when they will reopen.

"The Olympic and Paralympic Games were extraordinary and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will be no ordinary park."

Boris Johnson is to take charge of London's Olympic legacy, with current legacy chairman Daniel Moylan standing down after just four months in charge.

Moylan took on the role of chairman of the 2012 Olympics legacy body the London Legacy Development Corporation in May, replacing Baroness Margaret Ford.

He will now become the Mayor of London's full-time adviser on aviation policy, with Johnson taking on the Olympic legacy responsibilities.

Moylan was deputy chair of mayoral agency Transport for London in Johnson's last administration.

The Kensington and Chelsea councillor was first proposed by Johnson to be chair of the LLDC, which was established on 1 April 2012 to replace the Olympic Park Legacy Company.

Johnson said: "Daniel Moylan is a gifted politician with a superb brain. I've asked Daniel to take on one of the most important challenges of my second term, the vital task of driving our aviation policy.

"London is the heartbeat of the UK's economy. We must remain competitive, and to do that we need a coherent aviation strategy for 21st-century London. Daniel Moylan will help me deliver that."

These pictures of post-Olympic ruins show a fate that must never be allowed for London.

The pictures on the excellent Flavorwire website are from an exhibition called The Olympic City by photographer Jon Pack and filmmaker Gary Hustwit.

The Paralympics opens tonight, but in 12 days time London's time in the Olympic spotlight will come to an end.

Organisers insist that London's Olympic and Paralympic legacy is more secure than any previous host city with organisers placing as much emphasis on planning for the future as hosting the Games itself.

One example is that several of the venues for London have been built as temporary structures, particularly for sports that do not have a strong following in this country such as basketball and beach volleyball.

And the choice of the location for the Olympic Park itself is also cited with billions of pounds now pouring into an area of East London which was previously one of the poorest areas in Europe.

But let these pictures be a warning that, at this stage, the job is only half done.

Beijing 2008 Kayaking venue - picture credit: David Gray via The Atlantic

Athens 2004 Softball arena - picture credit: Jamie McGregor Smith via It's Nice That

Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympic ski jump - picture credit: Karen Barlow via cloudlessness

Munich 1972 Olympic Stadium train station - picture credit: Twin City Photos 

It is good to shout about yourself, but even better if someone else can do it for you.

There may have been a collective hangover feeling this week in the UK since the Games finished, but beneath that there is a swelling of pride, and it is good to see the world shares that feeling.

The world reaction to the London 2012 Olympic Games and the legacy it will leave for East London has been overwhelmingly positive, as these snippets below will show:

New York Times:
One of the great stories of these Olympics was the effect they had on England itself. Triumphalism does not come naturally to this country, where the cultural stock in trade has long been dignity in defeat. This, let's not forget, is a nation where one of the most beloved poems is Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which valorizes a military rout at the hands of the Russians. Full story.

Sydney Morning Herald:
London, you didn't half do a decent job. These Olympics had Sydney's vibrancy, Athens's panache, Beijing's efficiency, and added British know-how and drollery. With apologies to Sydney, they might just represent a new PB for the Olympics.
They were superbly organised. The Olympic Park's setting, in one of Britain's poorest boroughs, proved inspired. London consists of layers, new cities built on top of fallen or demolished old. Now another has been added. Some Olympic sites become wasteland after the Games. This one began as wasteland and is now full of possibilities. Derelict bits of old Stratford still poke through, without ruining the effect. It is a measure of Britain's maturity that it went to less effort to disguise its warts-and-all self for the Games than most Olympic cities do.
The Games were preceded by the usual fatalistic anticipation of a cock-up. It proved groundless. Moving masses of people around a mazy city was expected to be a nightmare but London made it look effortless. Security was plentiful but low key. The army, called in to meet a shortfall, proved to be Britain's finest ambassadors. Full story.

Chicago Tribune:
For the seven years after the IOC chose London, its residents expected a nightmare of transportation snafus, armed camp security, a recession made worse by Olympic cost overruns. What they got was the opposite, plus a different view of themselves through British athletes who now come from far more places than the playing fields of Eton. Full story.

China Daily:
British supporters will also cherish memories of the venue, where Somali-born runner Mo Farah won the 5,000 and 10,000 double to deafening roars and was celebrated as a symbol of the capital's multi-culturalism.
The host nation won 29 golds to take third place in the rankings, its best result for 104 years which helped lift the nation out of the gloom of an economic recession temporarily buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. Full story.

Washington Post:
Urged on by massive home crowds and a cheerleading press that defied predictions of Olympic cynicism, British athletes ran, cycled and rowed their way to their highest medal count since Britannia ruled the seas in 1908.
At these Games, the United States and China might be coming home with more gold, but this country of 62 million people that is roughly the size of Michigan reminded itself of its uncanny ability to punch above its weight. Full story.

The preferred occupier for the Olympic media centre, iCITY, says it has prelet 47% of the 1m sq ft site.

Speaking yesterday at an Olympic legacy press conference in London, the company's chief executive Gavin Poole said iCITY will announce new tenants in the autumn and expects tenants to move in by 2014.

While a significant portion of the prelets is taken up by Infinity's data centre and Loughborough University, Poole said his company had been in positive discussions with several businesses for further space.

In an interview with EGTV, Poole said talks had been held with business incubators, post production companies and Hackney Community College.

"We have TV studios and companies - a major channel looking at coming to relocate," he added.

"We have a robust business plan. That's what won us the bid. We are 47% prelet already and we are looking at taking it from 1m to 1.5m sq ft... because we are so confident that we are going to fill this space." 

Tonight the focus in the Copper Box arena will be on handball, but after the London 2012 Olympics it will become all about basketball.

The 6,000-capacity Copper Box arena is to become the new home of the Milton Keynes Lions British Basketball League club after the Olympic Games. The club will be renamed the London Lions. The move mirrors that of football club Wimbledon's move from London to Milton Keynes to become the MK Dons.

Tonight the Copper Box, which is also called the multi-use arena, will play host to the semi-finals of the women's handball competition.

But with the Olympics still ongoing and the new BBL season just over six weeks away, the Lions will not be able to move into the Copper Box until next year.

That move will come in time for the start of the 2013/14 BBL season.

The Copper Box will feature a flexible seating capacity and facilities for a wide range of community sports, competitions as well as cultural and business events.

It will become the third largest indoor arena in London and could attract around 400,000 visitors a year.

Jones Lang LaSalle consultant and Olympic rowing bronze medallist Alan Campbell is in no doubt that Britain will benefit from the 2012 Games.

Britain's first single sculls medallist since 1928 said the country will benefit from hosting the 2012 Games, both from a boost to business and from the legacy that has been created at the Olympic Park.

And today, on a visit to JLL's offices in Warwick Street, W1, he talked about his medal being for everyone in the UK and praised the country's efforts in hosting the Olympics.

"The Olympics have been really great for Britain," he said. "It has shown how great a party we can put on and how well this country can organise things."

Campbell, who broke down in tears as he was presented his medal last Friday, has been living a hectic life since.

Immediately after the medal presentation he was whisked off to meet former Olympic champions including Dame Kelly Holmes and Sally Gunnell as well as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.