Agents appointed at Hitachi home

Two commercial property firms have been appointed as agents to the vast development site in County Durham which is to be home to Hitachi Rail Europe.

Merchant Place Developments has appointed the Newcastle office of DTZ as regional consultant and CBRE as national consultant working on the 105-acre Amazon Park site at Newton Aycliffe.

Both firms have international reach to promote the site to potential inward investors from all corners of the world.

Chris Noyes, MPD’s development director, said the next stage in the marketing of the site has been reviewed now that the development plan for the 460,000 sq ft Hitachi Rail Europe project is ready to start.

“2013 will be a landmark year with construction of the Hitachi development on site starting this year. Now is a great opportunity for other occupiers to come to the site and join the excitement that will be generated as we move forward,” he said.

“Part of the process has been a review of our consultancy arrangements and we are delighted to announce the appointment of both DTZ and CBRE.”

Nick Atkinson, director, industrial agency at DTZ said: “We have the advantage of Hitachi Rail Europe as a catalyst to build upon and we see more opportunities from overseas investment.”

Toby Vernon, senior director, CBRE, added: “We see this as a great opportunity for Amazon Park where we can build almost a further one million square feet/100,000 square metres of industrial or warehousing buildings to sit alongside the new exciting Hitachi building. Amazon Park is a major regional strategic site that is large enough to accommodate large space users and occupiers in the HRE supply chain.”