Frustrated, Excited, and Ready to Build: What Sheffield's Property Leaders Really Think Right Now

The Last Friday Club held its first ever public/private sector panel in Sheffield last week. The mood? Surprisingly positive, but only once you get past the word "viability".

With UKREiiF 2026 concluded, let's explore what industry players are saying. There's a version of the Sheffield property conversation that goes nowhere. Everyone agrees it's hard, viability doesn't work, the old models are broken, and then you go home.

That version wasn't on show at the Last Friday Club last week, where the property professional networking organisation hosted its first-ever panel bringing public and private sector leaders into the same room together.

The three on stage: Rebecca Roffe, Planning and Environment Partner at CMS; Kate Josephs, Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council; and Guy Ackernley, Managing Director at Urban Splash.

Last Friday Club - Panel

All expertly chaired by Heather Williams of Ovo Spaces. As one attendee put it, it was great to get the suits up north, and the room felt it.

They spoke for an industry that is genuinely frustrated and, in the same breath, genuinely excited about what's happening in South Yorkshire. The mood, in the words of one panellist, was "surprisingly positive." Not naively so. But the appetite to actually build things, to get money working, to stop moaning and start solving. It was real.

The Word You Cannot Avoid: Viability

If you spend any time in property right now, you know what's coming.

Viability.

The panel said it early and said it often, because there's no honest conversation about development in 2026 without it.

Even prime schemes in Manchester aren't stacking up. That's not a Sheffield problem or a northern problem; it's an industry problem, and the people in that room were clear-eyed about it.

Interest rates are moving in the right direction but this is a materially different world from the one that underwrote a decade of regeneration assumptions. The old way of doing regen is not going to work.

What was striking was the refusal to stop there. There is public money available to spend on viability. The question is how public and private capital fit together in structures that don't rely on grants being endless, because they aren't. Long-term financing, creative deal structures, shared risk. That's the conversation Sheffield wants to be having, and increasingly it is.

The spirit in the room was well summed up by one panellist: "Let's not waste three days moaning about how hard it is. Let's talk about how to make it happen."

What's Actually Changed in Sheffield

A decade ago, Leeds and Sheffield had very few people living in their city centres. That has shifted significantly, and in Sheffield, the scale of what has been delivered in recent years is starting to feel tangible from the inside.

The Heart of the City project, a £470m mixed-use development, has completed its development phase, and it shows. Office occupancy is running at 98%, with DLA Piper, CMS, HSBC, and Irwin Mitchell all based there. Cambridge Street Collective has become one of the city's most visited destinations. The development didn't just deliver buildings; it delivered a place where people actually want to be. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

The investment pipeline is now genuinely well-documented. Sheffield City Council published its Investment Prospectus in May 2026, a clear, evidenced document laying out what's available, who to talk to, and where the city is heading.

Urban Splash's Managing Director on the panel called it "brilliant" and "very joined up." That kind of endorsement from an active developer, not a council press release, means something.

The West Bar development, which saw the Department for Work and Pensions take the entire 100,000 sq ft of No.1 West Bar Square in what the city describes as its largest office transaction in several years, is another marker. Over 7,000 civil servants are now based in Sheffield. The city is cementing itself as the UK's centre of gravity for national policy outside London.

Why Northern Growth Is Now a Real Conversation

The panel kept returning to complementarity. Sheffield and Leeds are not competing; they're part of the same economic story, and investors are starting to read it that way.

Northern Powerhouse Rail Phase 1 prioritises the Sheffield to Leeds corridor. The shared pitch, the shared team, the Landing Pad in Sheffield city centre as a joint front door for incoming investors: these are the structures that make a northern growth strategy credible rather than aspirational.

The theme of which sectors are performing was live in the room. Data centres are attracting significant active interest, with the consensus being that demand is going in one direction only and nobody can imagine it getting any smaller. The office market is more positive than it has been. Housing as an asset class remains genuinely difficult.

The broader question, why would you invest in the north, got a direct answer.

Cities whose economic strengths are complementary, a government that has publicly backed the region, a pipeline that is evidenced and deliverable, and a team that investors actually believe in. As one panellist put it: if they don't believe in the people, they won't invest.

Regen That Doesn't Leave People Behind

The part of the conversation that went deepest was about displacement. Regeneration looks brilliant on a slide. Done badly, it doesn't benefit the people who already live there and, in some cases, actively moves them out.

Sheffield City Council was direct about this. Consultation with local communities was unambiguous: residents don't want to be displaced and don't want to see the cultural or racial character of their neighbourhoods changed against their wishes. The council's position is that there has to be somewhere for everyone in the city, not just the people that a shiny new development is designed to attract.

Much of Sheffield's regeneration pipeline is on brownfield land and former industrial sites, which takes some of the pressure off. But the question of how you make regen feel real, how you make young people feel seen and invested in the city's future, isn't answered by the quality of the architecture. It requires intent and ongoing consultation from the start.

Don't Forget the Occupiers

One note that deserves more attention than it usually gets: the occupiers.

The panel was clear that Heart of the City works because it's a place where things happen, not because the buildings are impressive. Footfall, vibrancy, and cultural impact come from the businesses and organisations that move in.

The warning on the table is that occupiers will face real pressure from oil-linked inflation in autumn and winter. That feeds through to retail viability, to F&B, to the ground-floor activation that makes mixed-use schemes tick. Worth watching.

The INSIDER Take

Sheffield's property industry is not without its frustrations. Viability is real, housing is hard, and the old models need replacing.

But the mood at Last Friday Club last week was not a room full of people waiting for someone else to solve it. It was a room full of people who want to get things done, who are proud of what the city has built, and who are getting increasingly impatient with moaning when there are deals to be structured.

That's a good place to be.

Rico Naylor (MRICS) - Founder of CRE Insider

CRE Insider covers investment, development, and regeneration across the UK's cities. Got a tip or want to contribute? Get in touch at rico@cre-insider.com