Are letting agents letting us down over retail stores? - Kevin Buckle

Buchanan Galleries was to be demolished and repurposed as part of the Avenues Project with much more civic space, office space, retail, leisure, a new hotel and residential developments - its estimated cost was £800 million.

I did understand some of the thinking behind this in that maybe there is not a need for as many shops on the high street as there used to be and there will always be a need for more housing but demolishing an entire shopping centre had seemed a little drastic.

Now we are told that the owners have decided there is more demand for retail units than was expected and in this post pandemic world there is more demand from the public to visit those shops. There are other factors of course and by far the biggest issue for any building project is that costs have on the whole gone up by 35 per cent since these buildings were first planned.

This one fact alone makes doing very little to a building that is already there very attractive. On the other hand far closer to home the new build that received planning permission on the roof of Waverley Market has been on hold for some time now as building costs increased and rental incomes went down.

Letting agents however were getting things wrong long before the pandemic which has become a bit of a scapegoat for the agents’ failures in understanding their market.

All involved with the St James Quarter were super confident of how easy it would be to let out all the units based on it being a hub for big brands and didn’t seem to realise that the very fact that these big brands had been so successful in promoting their online businesses was reducing their customers’ need to visit their stores. The St James has certainly coped well in difficult times but it has not been the runaway success it was expected to be.

More housing in Glasgow’s city centre is a major part of the council’s plans as they aim to repopulate the centre with 40,000 residents by 2035 so these new plans will be a blow though there will be some relief as it appears there will no longer be an issue in how the redevelopment will affect the Royal Concert Hall steps.

I’m sure there is more to the Buchanan Galleries rethink than they are saying publicly. The biggest problem is that as I said earlier in what is a more complicated market than people think the agents responsible for letting out shops are getting it wrong partly I suspect in that by being so negative it covers their backs when explaining to a client why a shop is empty.

One thing that has certainly changed in Edinburgh is the percentage of locals, city centre workers and visitors making up sales with figures skewed far more now towards visitors.

Edinburgh has always had many visitor focused shops but they have tended towards people buying holiday souvenirs rather than simply shopping for themselves and buying things they have not seen at home or elsewhere.

Things are definitely more optimistic for retail than was thought as the pandemic ended but there is still some way to go in getting the right mix of shops on the high street.