We need onerous vacancy taxes. Currently by my understanding, vacant property actually gets tax breaks.
My pie in the sky dream would be for councils to buy high street shops, land and all, and rent them back with rent caps to small business owners. No more sky high business rates to worry about. Encourage small and medium size businesses to set up and grow their business up to a certain amount of turnover a year. Maybe that might reverse the trend in businesses abandoning the high street because there’s no customers and customers abandoning the high street because the prices are sky high?
But who am I fooling? I live in Bristol and what we need is the council to fund building of a mega arena not even inside Bristol 🤷.
Councils are going bankrupt because they can’t even run their own business. Letting them be landlords also is a recipe for disaster.
Not just the high street but also high density housing around as its the most valuable land in the city.
But I think it should all be done at market rate. Set a target of say 95% occupation and set the rate at that. If it’s 0 or if it’s 1,000,000 then so be it. The money can get returned to the town. Maybe have some alterations to this. Like 5 year contracts and if you renew you get a discount.
Land value tax is the closest we have to this and thankfully Wales is bringing it in. Its a very good system.
Remember it’s not the landlords, it’s the lack of parking
It’s the fact we all buy online
Why would I want to deal with crowds of people and shop keepers when I can just go online and have it delivered next day to my hands?
Reminds me of this series “Turn Back Time” in which they took shops from the high street throughout the ages to show how they’ve disappeared, and that was filmed 10 years ago.
I’d be interested to see this broken down on whether the high street has been pedestrianised or not. There’s high streets that are a busy road with shops, which I would avoid, and those that have been pedestrianised and are actually places where you can spend some time.
It’s been getting ridiculous around here.
Investors bought a lot of the commercial property a few years ago.
Rents went up a little, but the businesses could generally work out a deal they could afford.Once the interest on lending went up, however, those investors are being squeezed.
What was £1000/m interest on a £1500/m rental is suddenly £3000/m. So they squeeze the businesses…Who understandably tell them it ain’t going to happen.One of these places closed recently near me. The shop went from full trading to everything closed in under a fortnight.
The “to let” page on the local commercial lettings site said that they were “aiming to find a similar artisanal tenant”, or words to that effect.So now it’s empty, and a for sale board is up. No doubt at some point, it’ll become our 29th phone repair shop.
(If anyone has good information on how those shops pop up, I’d be really interested. I’ve always assumed they’re in for almost nothing, on a really short contract, so the landlord doesn’t have to pay rates)I would dearly love for the council to buy up commercial property, and give good deals to shops that add to a town.
