Retail vacancies: When is a shop not a shop?

You may have heard some numbers flying around today suggesting that nearly a quarter of Nottingham’s shops are now empty.
I’ll be having a look at this over the next couple of days, but a word of warning: the figures are not what they seem.
They have been compiled by an organisation called the Local Data Company, and they differ from other surveys about the comparative health of the retail sector in different cities.
Most property agents will tend to lump retail and leisure – such as restaurants and cafes – together when assessing the vitality of a town or city centre, since they feed of each other in creating an attractive environment for city visitors.
LDC’s data only counts shops in the purest sense – that is, those which sell comparison goods (fashion, for example), along with convenience stores and service outlets (such as shoe repairs).
So LDC’s data won’t cover units occupied by, for example, coffee shops, bars and restaurants.
I understand it did its fieldwork in Nottingham back in September last year, and that it also included the Broadmarsh Centre – where units were emptying ahead of the £40m revamp due to be carried out this year by Westfield.
The fieldwork includes a visual check of a shop to see if it is empty or occupied and a check against local authority rate data. What it may miss out on, though, is local market knowledge: while you and me might have seen an empty unit where the retailer Game used to be on Lister Gate late last year, an agent would have told you it had already been re-let to Costa Coffee, which had yet to do its fit-out.
This isn’t to suggest that parts of the economic bigger picture painted by LDC aren’t valid - retail is bound to suffer during and after recession. But its headline figure – that more than 23 per cent of Nottingham’s shops are empty – doesn’t tell the whole story.
LDC suggests the situation is even worse in Birmingham. What I suspect this points to is the fact that, in crude terms, there is simply more space in the bigger cities – some of which was probably not doing well even before recession struck.
Against the background of a structural deficit (i.e., permanently lost activity) in our economy, you have to wonder whether there will now be a structural deficit in retail, which is heavily exposed to the impact of credit conditions.
My take is that if there is it is more likely to be felt in marginal retail locations like towns than it is in naturally vibrant cities. We’ll see.