West Midlands retail offering blighted by empty shops
WHILE people may be flocking to visit Birmingham’s showpiece Grand Central and Mailbox shopping centres it’s a different picture for the traditional malls and high streets of the West Midlands, latest figures have shown.
While vacancy rates generally improved nationally in the second half of last year, the West Midlands still has one of the highest rates of empty shops anywhere in the country.
Latest figures released by the Local Data Company, show Burslem is the worst town in the country for empty shops with a vacancy rate of 33.1% (up 3.7% on H2 2014), while there are also two Black Country towns in the Top 10 of the same category – Walsall is seventh with a rate of 26% and West Bromwich tenth at 24.9%.
Hopes are high that the rates for both Walsall and West Bromwich will improve, with millions being invested in the areas in the hope of making them more attractive to retailers.
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As a whole, the region saw the largest decline in England for average vacancy rates during the second half of last year – standing at 15%, a decline of 1% over the six month period.
Shopping centres vacancies was also the highest in the country, standing at 18.6%.
Matthew Hopkinson, director at the Local Data Company, said the wide improvements in vacancy rates across the country were the result of more shops being filled rather than a reduction in the overall stock.
In part this is due to the significant expansion in leisure (food and beverage, and entertainment) outlets that continues at a pace but has raised concerns of a bubble.
Other reasons have been significant regeneration and developments reaching completion. Examples in 2015 included Grand Central in Birmingham and East Point Retail Park outside Nottingham.
“There are wide differences by location and asset class up and down the country so for a number of towns and shopping centres times are still very challenging where towns such as Dewsbury, Hartlepool, Walsall, Bootle, Bolton, Burslem and Wigan all have one in four of their shops lying empty,” he said.
“Many of these centres are north of the Watford Gap and this persistence of vacancy comes out clearly when we look at the key location health indicator of how long shops lie empty. For the North East, North West and West Midlands, they all have significant issues in the number of long-term vacant units where over 6% of their total stock has been vacant for more than three years.
Choosing to focus on the positive, he added 2016 had the potential to be a year of improvement, providing employment and wages continued to rise, and interest rates and inflation remained low.
“The fact, however, remains that Britain has too many shops, and we continue to build more, and many areas are blighted by this fact as seen by the thousands of shops that have no prospect of ever being reoccupied. Opportunity knocks for those who know where, what and how this is best done at the micro level.”
