“You could aim to halve your headline highstreet vacancy rate in 18 months. Some places will go further, faster.”
If you’re a council or BID team thinking to start the tackling vacancy journey or could use help on tricky challenges you’ve encountered if you’ve started already, do drop me a message…!
That “halving” headline is something I’ve said here before, but it feels very well worth repeating, especially after a week of really encouraging conversations with local tackling vacancy teams, some a way into the journey, others taking first steps.
Why…?
- partly because of the difference reducing the number of empty units you have and improving your mix of uses makes to the vibrancy and vitality of a place…
- …the positive impact that has on existing businesses who benefit when there are new reasons to draw people in, extra footfall, extending dwelling time;
- …and our experience that lettings encourage others to consider investing there too, so creating a momentum that builds;
- it can also help deliver on core national policy objectives: strengthening growth, increasing employment (especially among younger people) and boosting ‘pride in place’.
But it’s more than about the numbers. Our ‘place partnership’ approach is also about exploring ‘alternative’ / additional uses to take on empty spaces alongside retail, hospitality and services to add variety and the ‘experiential’ that’s such a big part of current conversation.
The other key feature is the emphasis on working together. Not just leaving this to agents and landlords but engaging and involving businesses, community, cultural organisations, council(s), chamber, BID if you have one and others identified locally, to take take up the challenge, together.
We know it works. Very different places in changed circumstances ten years apart have done it, others in between took teens vacancy rates into single figures, towns we’re working with now are on that journey too.
If we can inspire more places to join them, it’ll make a huge difference and we will, finally, get the long-stuck national headline vacancy rate into single figures too.
What do you think…?
