Treat recession recovery with caution

According to figures released last week France and Germany are officially out of recession. So what does this mean for companies that work across Europe and the UK?

Even though the two largest economies appear to be out of recession, Europe as a whole is still continuing to struggle.

Ever since the recession hit there have been many differences in the EU commercial property market place compared to the UK.

We, as a firm, initially believed that Germany and France were keeping their heads above water as our work remained constant even when in the UK orders began to drop.

However, about six months ago we saw things slow down, but still didn’t experience the recession in Europe as hard as we have in the UK.

We are still seeing a significant decrease in UK tender prices as workloads continue to fall back.

With any market recovery not anticipated much before mid 2010, competition for the contracts still available is becoming increasingly cut throat.

In France and Germany, though, we are currently doing more proposals than we were a few months ago and a number of clients have told us recently that they consider conditions right to start investing again.

This is clearly an indicator that business really is picking up and we hope that this continues across all the countries in which we operate.