Retail shake-out is past the worst – C&W
While you’re still reeling from yesterday’s record-busting retail letting on Oxford Street, here’s some more news on the market for retail space in the UK. Cushman & Wakefield says the average availability of retail premises on the top shopping streets in the UK fell to its lowest for 18 months at the start of August, reaching 9.8% compared with 11.1% in May.
C&W’s research includes shops held by retailers that are in administration, which accounted for 1.4% of the total stores surveyed. Its analysis covered the key retail streets of the UK’s main town and city centres – not including out-of-town shopping centres, factory outlet centres or retail parks. The group says that while caution persists, there has been a marginal improvement in retail market sentiment over the past six months, which appears to have filtered through to retail availability levels. “Stronger operators are capitalising on previous failures and expanding their market share,” C&W says. It thinks the worst of the “shake-out” among retailers as a result of the economic downturn is now over.
Looking at the retail centres individually, the lowest levels of available retail space at the start of August were in Central London (5.1%) and the North (7.7%). Outer London has the highest level of availability (17.4%), followed by the Midlands (12.1%) and Scotland (11.0%).
John Strachan, head of retail at Cushman & Wakefield, said: “The recent decline in retail availability, whilst marginal, is encouraging and we remain cautiously optimistic that the overall level of availability will continue to edge downwards in the coming months. However, it is clear that retailer demand and therefore availability will differ widely by location. For example, Central London continues to see very strong retailer demand, as do large cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool where availability has continued to fall. In contrast, some smaller towns continue to struggle to attract significant retailer interest and availability in these locations is expected to remain high for some time to come.”
We’re taking a few days off now – and like all property professionals we will of course be reading the BPF’s new Property Data Report on the beach…
