For over a century Estates Gazette has been the British estate agent’s bible. So when the EG gives a commercial scheme the thumbs up, everything on the high street is sweetness and light; conversely, when the mag trashes your plans, join the Job Centre queue.
This summer the magazine paid a surprise visit to Hereford to check out the viability of the ESG scheme in the current economic climate, to talk to the city’s commercial property experts and to look around the existing city centre. Under the largest empty stores—the former Chadds department store and Woolworths Eign Gate unit—together total around 24,000sq ft sq of unoccupied retail space, equivalent to more than 6% of all the new shopping units envisaged by ESG for its much-vaunted retail sector north of the Inner Ring Road. At the beginning of September, Herefordshire Council’s register of vacant commercial premises totalled a staggering 100,000sq ft. banner headline “Shopping Centre or Car Park?” it painted a less-than-rosy picture of the council-inspired scheme. It reports that due to the recession, Stanhope had to rethink the project’s shopping content, which would now be in two phases each of 191,000sq ft, the first with a revised opening date of 2012. Overall cash injection would have to be in the order of £100-million and the new retail sector’s first phase would need to be at least 50% pre-let to encourage institutional investors.
But local commercial property specialist Jon Turner felt that pre-letting almost 100,000sq ft in Hereford was wildly optimistic. “When the market was booming, demand for this space was plainly apparent, but there isn’t the demand for it now.”
Contrasting with this sober realism, Estates Gazette found ESG’s Chief Executive Jonathan Bretherton singularly bullish. He said that he was confident that Stanhope would secure funding, dismissing the argument that the city already had more than the national average of vacant shops, since these were “all too small and poorly configured to satisfy market requirements”.