PROPERTY experts are offering different views on how Oxford's traffic problems are affecting businesses' choice of where to set up offices.

Vivienne Spurge, of FPD Savills, said: "Increasing traffic congestion in Oxford is one of the main reasons that more and more small companies wish to relocate out of town - and their favourite form of new office is a barn or farm building conversion."

However, Christian Vecchione, of agents Benedicts, warned that the price of office space in Oxford was soaring because demand was so high.

He said: "The supply of well-located, good-quality office accommodation with parking in and around Oxford is now so severely limited that the demand for office space within the city is not being satisfied.

"Not only is this under-supply pushing up rental and capital values, it also threatens to hamper the growth of the local economy."

He predicted that the situation would deteriorate until developers were more willing to fund speculative development.

He recently sold the chapel and lodge at the former Littlemore Hospital, and said it had attracted wide interest from companies looking for space in the city. The chapel at Littlemore Park, as it is now known, was sold to software designers Inheritance Systems. The lodge has gone to another expanding local company.

However, Ms Spurge said that for some years there had been a trend for companies to move out of town if they could.

"Town centres are becoming less popular because of increasing traffic congestion, rising car parking charges and the fall of quality working environment.

"Converted barns and new office buildings in the countryside offer an excellent opportunity for individual self-contained units with style and car parking space.

"Companies are prepared to pay top rentals for the privilege of having this type of accommodation," she said. Consultancy, design and electrical firms had set up shop at Rycote Lane Farm at Milton Common; Milletts Farm at Garford, near Abingdon; Lower Farm Barns at Bucknell near Bicester; the Dovecote and Monkswell, Little Baldon.

Landowner Lord Rotherwick has cashed in on the trend at Cornbury Park, Charlbury, where FPD Savills, with joint agents Clegg Kennedy Drew, are marketing three units being built in the final phase of a successful office conversion of the stables of an old stud farm at Southill.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.