Encouraging update this week from one of the early adopters for the new High Street Rental Auctions power for local councils.
I get that not everyone is a fan and that #property colleagues in particular have been critical (on a scale of comments ranging between “unworkable” and “unnecessary”).
From our tackling #highstreet vacancy perspective tho, we’ve always seen this as a valuable extra tool in the toolkit, but something that’s there as a last resort if the ‘place partnership’ approach doesn’t cut it in one or two cases.
But we hoped it would do two things:
- + encourage more town and city centres to get on the case and believe reducing their number of empty units and improving the mix of uses is something they can make a difference on (which it is);
- + demonstrate that by engaging with agents and landlords, places can make progress on helping get vacants back in play without actually needing to trigger the auction itself.
That was the early feedback from Lichfield as they updated council and other colleagues on a very well attended MHCLG webinar on Rental Auctions this week.
Early days, small sample and much more to come from the other authorities working on this, but still good to hear.
As our recently updated guide to tackling vacancy sets out, there can be a number of reasons why landlords aren’t progressing empty units as quickly as the place would like. Many of them are sound from their commercial, financial perspective – just not what the location wants to hear. Reaching out to them and setting out the potential for other stakeholders to help, can for sure help get the job done.
It’d be great to hear from other early adopter locations or #placemaking colleagues who’ve recently started a tackling vacancy journey…
And if you’d like a copy of the guide do please shout…!
