West Midlands High Street woe set to continue
THE recent difficulties faced by retailers look set to continue for the foreseeable future as chartered surveyors predict further falls in rental values.
Property industry body RICS’s latest UK commercial market survey (Q4 2012) reveals that 40% more respondents in the West Midlands expect rents to continue to fall rather than rise over the coming months. This comes amidst the recent turmoil seen in the retail sector with High Street giants HMV and Blockbuster entering administration.
The main driver behind this predicted drop is the steadily rising amount of unoccupied floor space and “anaemic demand”. During the last three months of the year, interest from would-be tenants failed to see any considerable pick up which resulted in a steady increase in empty premises.
Simon Rubinsohn, RICS chief economist, said: “The end of 2012 was yet another incredibly tough period for the High Street, brought to a head by the recent news of HMV, Blockbuster and Jessops who have dominated the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
“Sadly, this downbeat picture doesn’t look like changing any time soon with demand for retail space continuing to drop and more empty premises set to blight the country’s town centres.”
Across Great Britain, demand for retail space saw the most significant falls in the capital with London surveyors reporting the heftiest drops since mid-2009.
