Struggling. Ailing. One in the headline. The other in the intro. Both words used to describe the #highstreet by a national media report this week.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, I was writing notes on 4 #TheVacantShopsAcademy locations:
+ Place 1 has all but halved a 25% vacancy rate in 18 months;
+ Another has seen a headline figure of 30 visibly vacant units at our ‘audit’ in April down to just 7 ‘empty and available’ by September;
+ A third location has no suitable unit for an expanding #retail brand that is keen to be there. It’s worth adding here that it’s far from rare we find brands with requirement lists for places they’d like to be but have no space for them;
And finally, a place that had seen vacancy numbers rising, up to 25 empty units (18% of its total) nine weeks ago, now has 5 of those listed as ‘under offer’ and 2 let.
Also… on the same day as the media story mentioned at the start, Gail’s reported opening its 150th site, the MD of Cornish Bakery announced their 63rd, the Executive Chairman at Loungers said: “Delighted to say we’ve opened our 237th Lounge (& 276th site overall),” and the UK CEO of Søstrene Grene lists 6 maybe 7 new locations as their “expansion accelerates for the final quarter of 2024”. All this in the week WHSmith celebrated “our 50th Toys”R”Us shop-in-shop is now open!” And as Laura Harris can tell you from her brilliant #HighStreetPositives campaign, there’s much more like that.
So what’s occurring….? Well the easy bit is that we’ve still work to do to promote the positives and switch that media narrative.
But how to explain the numbers in our briefings…? Here’s a theory.
There are 4 sorts of place.
+ One that had high empty unit rates but got a tackling vacancy-focused ‘place partnership’ on the case;
+ Another that attracts brands and indie occupiers and is going well, with proactive and supported agents & landlords making the most of that;
+ A third is smaller places with only a few vacant units that need work hard to ensure use types they draw in for those that remain add to the mix;
+ And then there are the town and city centres that, for a variety of reasons, aren’t (yet) prioritising vacancy at all.
Am I missing a type…? Which one is your place…?
I’d love to hear your views…
