Manchester Regeneration: Jobs first, towers second - Part 2 of 4

Manchester's residential boom is not what most people think it is. It is the shadow of employment growth.

Spend an evening with someone outside the industry and the conversation about Manchester's regeneration goes the same way. 

"Who is buying all those flats in all those towers?"

They picture wealthy individuals snapping up apartments to sit on. The reality is less luxury, and far more important: most of those homes are rented, often shared, by people who moved here for work.

That distinction is the whole story. 

Manchester's residential boom did not create the city's growth. It followed it.

Rewind fifteen years and the towers were not there, because the jobs were not there.

Over the past decade and a half, Manchester drew in employment at a pace that changed the place, and the housing came chasing the pay packets. Take the work away, and the residential market goes with it. The homes are a consequence, not a cause.

Phil Mayall, Managing Director of Muse, has watched the shift up close, and he marks it with a single comparison.

Phil Mayall - Managing Director of Muse

When Phil started out, winning an occupier was hand-to-hand combat. 

Bank of New York took space at 1 Piccadilly Gardens only after Manchester's then chief executive, Howard Bernstein, flew to New York four times to convince them to take around 100,000 sq ft.

Fast forward a decade and Amazon took around 90,000 sq ft at NOMA, all six floors of the Hanover Building, without anything like the same courtship. The city transcended the need to ask; it became a given.

That is what people miss about “inward investment”.

For years Manchester did not simply receive it. It fought for every letting. And a lot of the growth was not new names arriving at all, but firms already here expanding, or moving functions north. When Freshfields took 80,000 sq ft at One New Bailey in 2017, that was a legal-services operation creating brand-new jobs in Salford, not a company shifting its logo from one building to another.

Here is why it matters for anyone reading the market. 

If the city stops supplying space for employers, the jobs stop coming. And when the jobs stop, the residential demand that everyone can see from the tram dries up behind it.

That single line explains one of the most contested decisions in the city. Central Retail Park, a 10.5-acre site in Ancoats, has sat largely empty since 2021 while campaigners pushed hard for it to become a public park. 

The council held firm and kept it earmarked for employment, most recently a digital campus. 

Not because anyone is against green space, and not because the need for parks is not real, but because employment land is desperately hard to replace. You cannot conjure it back once it is gone, so you protect it even when holding the line is unpopular.

Manchester's regeneration: The takeaway is simple and slightly counter-intuitive. 

The health of Manchester's residential market is not really a residential story. It is an employment story wearing a residential coat.

Watch the office and jobs pipeline, because that is where the market turns first. When occupiers commit, the homes and the demand follow. When they hesitate, no amount of new apartments will paper over it.

The towers went up because the work came first. Keep that order in mind, and the rest of the market makes sense.