All owners of retail property have a fundamental and serious question to answer: what is the point of shops? Do we really need to visit them any more?
Investors have been fretting about the value of bricks-and-mortar retail property for some time. The share price of Hammerson, the UK’s largest listed landlord of shopping centres, has long traded below the value of its real estate portfolio.
In the US, listed funds are aggressively shorted by investors betting against retail property.
