People tend to pull a certain face when you say Mansfield. Pained, slightly pinched with raised eyebrows. Steve Bateman, director at LaSalle Investment Management, knows the look only too well. Having dropped £53m in the North Nottinghamshire town as part of a portfolio of two centres from Premier Property Group, he is used to the mild sarcasm the ex-mining town elicits.
The news this week that the global fund manager was to buy a quarter of Mansfield’s retail floorspace in the shape of the 230,000 sq ft Four Seasons shopping centre – complete with the potential for a fractious relationship with the council, which retains a long lease on the centre’s car park, in a town decimated by pit closures in the 1990s and still boasting one of the lowest levels of earning in the country – left many wondering if it had lost its marbles. Was it a ploy to cash in on a red-hot shopping centre investment market rather than a serious long-term play?
Bateman shakes his head vigorously. The firm is set to make an investment of around £3.5m to revamp and refresh the centre with a view to keeping it as a long-term hold.
“A lot of towns are massively over-shopped, but this isn’t the case in Mansfield. The Four Seasons is the town centre and it owns its catchment. If there was a Superdry in here I’d be worried, it’s not that sort of scheme, but it is a single shopping centre, in a decent-sized town with a low vacancy rate and a footfall of around 8m,” he says.
The feeling that Mansfield might have somehow been overlooked and misjudged is hard to escape. Expectations of the town are low, to be polite. “Isn’t it the home town of glassing?” said one property expert. It is not. “People’s perception of Mansfield is of a dark, dirty place of flat caps and whippets. But when they come they see it’s bright and the shops are inviting,” says Kate Alsopp of Mansfield district council.
On a sunny Tuesday it is home to a thriving market. Independent shops have set up and stayed and vacant units are few and far between.
In fact, a picture of the city posted on Twitter elicited the response: “Is that somewhere in the south of France?”
Against the odds Mansfield is scaling the retail index rankings, albeit off a low base. Figures from Experian show that Mansfield climbed from 137th in the country in 2011 to 112th in 2012, and maintained that position last year. Comparison spend increased by £29m to £313.4m between 2012 and 2013. According to figures from the Local Data Company, its vacancy rate stands at a modest 14.4%, slightly above the regional rate at 11.8% and a touch above the country’s overall level of 12.1%.
Within the Four Seasons shopping centre, this drops to 7% – by number of units. Occupiers and investors alike describe the council as energetic and engaged and have nothing but praise for the city’s business improvement district.
So what is the town doing wrong? Rebekah O’Neill, shopping centre manager at the Four Seasons, sums it up: “I always think Mansfield is a bit of a secret. We are trying to challenge that.
“Retailers do well here and are generally in the top quarter of their region. Whenever we have new retailers set up, they exceed their targets.”
On average, shoppers visit 96 times a year, which O’Neill says is “a lot higher than anywhere else I’ve worked”.
But there is still work to be done in the centre. Bateman describes the architecture of the 1970s shopping centre as “brutal”.
“There’s been little money spent on it. It could be a better trading environment but we are not talking about anything ground-breaking here, it’s not that sort of scheme,” he explains.
Improvements are on the way. Work will be done to improve the entrance, and moderate the dominance of the library. Lighting will be changed and the “egg crate” ceilings improved.
The leisure offer in the scheme is lacking, and the council is keen to have a centre that doesn’t close at 5pm. But Bateman says large-scale leisure offerings will have to be accommodated in other sites in the city (see box, p95) although there is room for a branded coffee offer.
Despite a rent roll of around £2m pa, the scheme is a bit jumbled up, says Bateman and the five vacant units give LaSalle an opportunity to shuffle the pack. One unit is under offer to a single price retailer.
In addition, he points to department store Beales, saying: ‘They certainly have too much space, so there is an opportunity there.”
At the height of the market, headline zone-A rents on Westgate in the city centre were in the mid-£80s, but fell back to the mid-£60s.
Bateman brushes aside talk of zone-A aspirations: “A lot of landlords talk about rental tone and zone A, but that’s not us.
“With the units available we’ve had more than one retailer interested in them and that is driving rents in the right direction.”
What’s more important he adds, is the tenant tone rather than the rental tone.
People might make a face when you say Mansfield but, with a light touch and a few improvements, could LaSalle end up having the last laugh?
The council seeks ‘shovel-ready’ leisure sites
Mansfield district council has commissioned Colliers International to soft market test the city’s leisure potential with a view to moving forward several of its “shovel ready” sites to accommodate more.
Would the council pay to get these off the ground? Mike Robinson, head of regeneration, town centre and leisure at Mansfield council, says it has a good track record of leveraging in external funds.
However, he warns: “It is very tough [to get cash]. Austerity means less government grants and the council in essence has to borrow and we have to be able to afford the repayment.”
? Stockwell Gate: the future of the former run-down 1970s bus station
is now being gauged. The 2.4 ha site links into the Four Seasons shopping centre and is ripe for development.
It has been earmarked for leisure use by the council.
? Mansfield Old Town Hall: overlooking the market square, this listed building is also earmarked for development by the council for possible hotel, conference or function uses.
? White Hart Street and Church Street: planning permission is in place for a mixed-use leisure, retail and residential development of around 20,000 sq ft.
Taking a risk with the Queen’s Place development
At the end of last year, Mansfield district council was preparing to launch Queen’s Place, the first commercial scheme in the town for a decade.
The six offices and two retail units were a big risk for the council; a £2.4m risk, funded in the main by the council, but topped up with £870,000 from the European Regional Development Fund.
But grand gestures don’t go unnoticed, and not everyone has been happy with the scheme.
MP Sir Alan Meale launched what the local papers called a blistering attack on the district council, claiming it was mismanaging the town. He raised concerns in the Chad over the “still empty Queen’s Place development… potential firms are being put off by sky-high business rates and overly long lease terms – with 132,000 sq ft of office and retail space empty in Mansfield.”
The council seems calm in the face of the criticism. “It’s easy to criticise and do nothing. It takes grit and determination to have a vision and to stand up to the critics and to do things right,” says Kate Allsopp, portfolio holder of regeneration at the local authority.
She adds: “We fought against other projects around the country to get that money, and we needed a statement that told people when they arrive that they’d arrived somewhere special.”
Figures show that 5.5m people pass through the revamped £10m Mansfield bus station each year, more than the East Midlands airport, says the council.
In the next 12 months the council hopes to see a leisure operator trading on the ground floor and a café culture.
Meanwhile, in Derby
Intu’s purchase of the Westfield Derby mall, part of its £867.8m triple purchase from the Australian developer, saw it gain 1.3m sq ft of shopping centre space across 180 shops in the city. But it’s the fate of one unit less than 400 yards down the road that has become the focus locally.
With the purchase came the city centre’s former Debenhams store. The feeling in the market is that Westfield bought the store to help ease Debenhams’ path into their new centre, then held the unit strategically. “It’s perhaps what any owner of a shopping centre would do to minimise any potential impact of a multi-use operator or supermarket acquiring it,” says Richard Jones, director of retail and leisure agency at Lambert Smith Hampton. Jones says there has been interest to develop the space at ground level for retail with office space above and a gym. Intu said it could not comment on its plans for the store.
But Jones adds: “Intu may take a similar approach, which is clearly at the frustration of many local residents and traders… the store is seen to be key to the regeneration of the retail streetscape in Cathedral Quarter and St Peters Quarter.”
Nadia.Elghamry@estatesgazette.com
