Here’s the answer to having more business types from your wish list on the highstreet…
…and it doesn’t include waiting for the government to adjust planning policy to help limit those you’re less keen on.
Partly because that might take a while to introduce, but mostly because there’s stuff YOU can do now.
Why wait…? You could be working on halving your headline vacancy rate in 18 months and improve that mix of uses at the same time.
Deciding, together, as a place what goes into those empty units and, importantly helping make that happen, are crucial to delivering the vibrant, varied town and city centres we’re looking for…
…but it’s still an approach only being taken by a few rather than many.
Too often still we’re leaving things to the commercial property market, even though we know it’s grappling with its own challenges.
On average 53% of visibly vacant units in places we’ve run our ‘audit’ didn’t have an agent involved in trying to get them let (that ongoing dataset now covers more than 1,000 empty units across 46 locations)…
…and even when there is a letting, resident and existing businesses feedback is sometimes underwhelming because they don’t feel the new occupier adds to the current mix.
So rather than think of tackling highstreet vacancy as “just an agent-landlord thing”, get the whole place – council(s), chamber, BID where there is one, existing businesses, community, cultural organisations – to join in.
- work together to overcome barriers to getting units ready to be occupied (maybe their condition, size, layout need sorting);
- think about what ideal occupiers look like and canvas the views of your communities about what they’d like to see and would support;
- consider ‘alternative’ / additional use types that might work;
- then go try recruit target occupiers, potentially via a place-led pop-up shop project to give them a start.
We call it a ‘place partnership’ approach and we’re super excited to be heading out & about again in the next few weeks to support local teams that are getting on the case.
If your town or city centre has more empty units than you’d like and / or you’re concerned that the mix of occupiers is changing but in a way that’s not as positive as it could be, we’d love to help…!
The image features ‘Rock Your Garden’, Galashiels – a story that’s well worth checking out, as this explains: “After years of building his business through markets and events across the Borders, Lee was ready to take the next step and open his first permanent premises in Galashiels. With support from BID for Galashiels, Lee was able to navigate the commercial property process and find a home for Rock Your Garden in the town centre.”
