Scotland
Where Now for the Town’s High Streets? By David Glen, Principal, Glen & Co Chartered Surveyors
to pay the staff to sell it, pay the utility bills, pay the landlord their rent, the Local Authority their Rates and then set a competitive retail price to advertise to the market and, for all that enterprise and effort and - heaven forfend – maybe try and squeeze a wee bit of profit, is an incredibly tough ask these days.
That conundrum is further complicated when dealing with the physical attributes of the property. Say you do have what looks a viable plan that allows you to make a profit on each unit of product – how many units to you have to sell each day/week/month to justify your labour? Many tenement shops, commonplace along Scottish High Streets, are just not physically big enough to allow for stocking enough product to keep the tills ringing over.
I’ll start with a quick list: Kitchen Showrooms, Laundromats, Bookmakers, Chiropractors, Estate Agents, Hairdressers, Dog Groomers, Family Lawyers, Amusement Arcades - what do they all have in common?
Twenty years ago – and I am acutely aware of how old that may make me seem - I was casting about the great and the good of the Scottish property market seeking their advice on whether going to work under my own banner as a commercial property agent would be a good idea (Spoiler: it seems to have worked out okay. So far).
Among all the highly valued advice, one of those wise old sages cautioned me to be very careful about the first dozen or so properties that would be graced with a Glen & Co TO LET board.
The theory being that those first few instructions set the base DNA for how the firm would go on to either flourish or perish. Do not rush into taking just any instruction just to be seen to be working – do not be a busy fool.
Unfortunately for me, but perhaps equally unsurprisingly, every agent in town would give their eye teeth for a dozen instructions on Buchanan Street so breaking into that market looked a rather daunting prospect.
Therefore, with a mortgage to pay and a young family at home, the practicalities of not picking up a salaried payslip at the end of every month very quickly persuaded me that my TO LET boards went up on the type of properties where I had cut my teeth and already had fifteen years of experience and a track record with clients – secondary High Street and roadside retail.
To say the High Street has had something of a tough time of late is stating the bleedin’ obvious.
A theory I discuss regularly with clients is just how hard it is to retail product. To buy something at a wholesale price, to stock it,
The till ringing is the whole raison d’etre as to why the shop is open. As an aside, it never fails to infuriate me how my favoured local bakery (note also that since the demise of Malcolm Campbell many moons ago, no-one yet seems to have been able to develop an independent chain of profitable salad bars or greengrocers, much to my chagrin and waistband’s detriment) seems to have a constant queue of people but, if I tune in while standing in that queue, it becomes quite obvious that till is just not ringing with the frequency that the potential of the queue seems to imply. I can stand for two, three, five minutes or more while each order is assembled and paid for.
But to get the till ringing faster you need more staff; that requires more space to stock and prepare more product, and you can quickly see how costs expand quicker than the till will ever be able to get ahead.
The list at the head of this piece? They are all High Street premises that I have either let or acquired for clients over the past eighteen months or so. What they have in common is the customer goes into the premises, conducts their transaction and leaves with no product, and most often a little less money in their wallet. With the notable exception of the substantial amount of food and beverage offerings – which touched on briefly but is probably worthy of a whole other piece in its own right - nowhere have I let or acquired any retail premises that involves the occupier selling a physical item.
The High Street is having a tough time of it just now, no doubt; but it is alive and well. It is adapting before your eyes to becoming more a place of service than a place of physical product.
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COMMERCIAL PROPERTY MONTHLY 2024
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