BIRMINGHAM, U.K. — Not a crash, but a multi-vehicle pile-up: The bad news in the U.K. auto sector just keeps on coming, one dire announcement plowing into the back of another.

Last week Honda announced plans to close its Swindon plant in 2022 and return manufacturing to Japan, with the loss of 3,000 jobs.

The Honda shock came just weeks after JLR announced it would shed 4,500 jobs, most of them in the U.K., and Nissan decided not to manufacture the X-Trail SUV in Sunderland.

Auto manufacturing is a vital part of the U.K. property market outside of London. Total occupation runs into tens of millions of square feet, from the car marques themselves and on into the supply chains they support. But since 2016 auto sector take-up has been falling. In the West Midlands, for instance, it accounted for 1.5M SF of take-up in 2016, falling to just 500K SF in 2018, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

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Waffle House's headquarters looks slapped together, with a glass-paneled addition attached to a low-slung brick building. It also is easy to miss, perched behind the curtain of a tall black fence and below a two-lane street in Norcross, a suburban city 20 miles north of Downtown Atlanta.

The only way anyone would know they are at the headquarters of one of the world's largest restaurant chains is a solitary Waffle House flag, flapping in a cold breeze on a recent February afternoon.

As corporations chase the next gleaming standard of corporate real estate prestige, the Waffle House headquarters is as understated and homey as its more than 1,900 U.S. restaurants. Despite ranking among the 50 largest restaurant chains in the world, with revenues estimated in excess of $1.3B in 2017 alone, according to Restaurant Business, executives at this chain have no desire to follow the trend and move into one of the many new gleaming skyscrapers in the city.

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