Opportunities for retail centres in 2025
Retail in Town Centres for 2025
The analysis of retail sales indicates that post Covid-19 in-store shopping is stabilising at around 75% of all sales. The successful retailers respond quickly to demand, present a seamless omni channel offer in store and online and deliver purchase and return routes that support choice.
The success of retail is intrinsically linked to attracting footfall. While standalone retail locations concentrate on the retailer offer, access and location, retail in town centres operates in the context of other footfall drivers. Employment, heritage, leisure, education, health and civic uses also define why people visit, or live in, town centres.
How town centres align uses, manage movement and how they manage change, is the challenge for creating attractive locations. For town centres this has always been about repurposing existing buildings and regenerating places. The best town centres are holistically managed to create mutually beneficial outcomes for uses that attract footfall that must include its retail offer.
The Government’s ambitious commitment to deploy £5 billion by 2026 is not matched with an equally ambitious programme to revitalise town centres, to which only £1 billion is committed until 2026. Therefore, it will be down to those with skin in the game, especially owners or occupiers to make the necessary changes with limited grant funding available.
The alignment of vendor and purchaser pricing of retail schemes, due to occupier and rent stability, has been slowly unfurling private sector investment.
Through force of necessity, retail occupiers and retail property owners are having to become aligned to mitigate operational costs and meet the external threats to the high street. Sharing data more openly, to effectivity assess how stores and locations are performing, will help ensure the capital available for investment in retail, when deployed effectively alongside other investment in town centres, will ensure town centres survive and thrive for users, occupiers and asset owners.
Of concern for 2025 is the risk that any potential sector growth gets choked off by cost increases, whether the selected increased employer and other mandated environmental costs or inflationary driven by global events. Whether these side impacts can be alleviated by reform process reform or compounded by slow or no reform to the existing process, that block or delay investment remains to be seen. Such reforms create an environment that stimulates demand and attracts investment.
If opportunity led commercial investment decisions can be matched with pragmatic local authority structures and time conscious decision taking, benefits can be delivered at lower risk and cost. The challenge will be whether the political will, skills and capability are there to match the opportunities through effective decision taking.
When challenges threaten project viability; TCR provides effective mechanisms to unlock delivery.