We’ve got to get past the idea that landlords of empty highstreet units are absentee or greedy or both…
…at least we do if we’re going to make the rapid progress we can on reducing vacancy rates in our town and city centres and get the long-stuck national rate into single figures where it belongs.
Talk to owners of empty town and city centre properties as we do regularly in our tackling highstreet vacancy work and you find a different story.
Some are trying with agents to find a tenant but cannot because the circumstances of the town as a whole don’t help;
They may lack the resources to get the unit into the size, layout or condition it needs be to let in today’s market;
Any deal they do might be impacted by an agreement with a bank which says no at a certain rent level;
They may have a tenant that’s left but is still paying rent on an unexpired lease;
The landlord might have had bad experiences with tenants in the past, cannot find one that works with office or resi occupiers on upper floors, and so on…
We’ve included a fuller list in the ‘Tackling High Street Vacancy’ guide in our series, but the above give you a sense of the challenge.
It’s looking like early adopter councils of the government’s High Street Rental Auctions power are finding some of the same things: engaging with landlords and seeing empty units coming back into play without actually needing to get to the auction stage at all.
It’s important to say that we do find landlords who are less proactive than they might be, some of them making use of – for example – flaws in the business rates regulations. But having done a consultation on evasion and avoidance not long back, the government ought to be able to fix those before long.
For the rest we still believe that working together, our ‘place partnership’ approach is the best, quickest, most sustainable way to do this.
If we base policy, projects and regulation only on the absentee / greedy perspective (or delinquent as one writer phrased it this week), we’ll miss opportunities to move forward.
I know there are councillors, campaign groups, even close placemaking colleagues who see things differently, favouring another set of sticks over my alternative.
Where do you stand…?
