Having a positive, proactive ‘place partnership’ on the case makes a huge difference to how quickly and sustainably you’ll reduce your #highstreet vacancy rates and improve your town or city centre mix of uses.
Why…?
I’m looking forward to making the case in a presentation for the Heritage Network at their ‘High Street Regeneration: Collaborating for Success’ event in Newport this week.
Our experience over 12 years now points to a range of reasons why we see bringing together agents, landlords, businesses, community, cultural organisations, councils, chamber and BID where you have one, as a must-do…
Firstly tackling vacancy is more than just an agent-landlords thing. The commercial property market has its own challenges and in any case – as a survey we did of #TheVacantShopsAcademy locations showed – on average 40% of visibly vacant units don’t have agents involved anyway, so no lettings detail, no easy route to connecting with landlords;
Your existing businesses and community can give you invaluable insights into what use types they’d most value in empty units to help you with what to try recruit;
Some of the barriers to getting empty units back into play are hard for a landlord or incoming tenant to tackle solo, but other members of the partnership can help, starting by taking a look inside the vacants as a team;
Potential occupiers on the arts & crafts to health & wellbeing list of ‘alternative’ or additional use types often find it harder to navigate the challenges around securing a unit than more regular #retail or #hospitality do, so a partnership approach can help;
Running a pop up or meanwhile use project typically works much better if it is town-wide rather than a one-stakeholder, one-off;
Promoting the place, opportunities there are to take on units, and incoming businesses and organisations as they arrive is so much more powerful if all the stakeholders are doing that together.
And so it goes on…
It’ll be interesting to get feedback from conference delegates on the rationale, and we’re always keen to hear from places with mid / high teens or over 20% vacancy rates, and especially those considering deploying the new High Street Rental Auctions power.
Do let us know what you think…?
