What makes a retail pitch "prime"?

Pitch is a precise idea

Retail property people talk about the "hundred per cent pitch", the single best position on a street, where footfall peaks. Everything else is measured against it as a percentage.

The distances are small. A unit fifty yards from the hundred per cent pitch, past a junction or a gap in the frontage, can command noticeably less rent and trade materially worse. That is why location in retail means the specific stretch and side of a specific street, not the town.

What makes a pitch prime

Footfall. How many people pass, at what times, on which days. It is measured, and the data is bought and sold.

Anchors and neighbours. Strong retailers generate footfall for the shops around them. A pitch anchored by names that draw people is stronger than one without, and retailers will pay to sit next to complementary occupiers.

Desire lines. Where people actually walk between where they arrive and where they are going: the station, the car park, the main square, the Minster. Pitches on that path work; pitches slightly off it do not.

Continuity of frontage. An unbroken run of shops keeps people walking. A gap, a blank frontage, a side road or a change of level breaks the flow, and pitch quality often drops sharply just past it.

Configuration. Frontage width, depth, ceiling height, and whether the useful space is at ground level.

Why prime matters more than it used to

Retail has polarised. Online shopping has taken a share of the demand for physical space, and what remains has concentrated. Retailers running fewer, better stores compete for the best pitches and give up the marginal ones.

The result is that the gap between prime and secondary has widened a great deal. Prime pitches in strong towns continue to let, sometimes competitively. Secondary pitches a short walk away can struggle to let at any rent.

For an investor that makes precision about location more important than it was, not less. Averages across a town tell you very little. In York we have let restored units on Coney Street to national retailers within months of finishing the building works, while other streets in the same city have had units standing empty for years.

Rebasing

Where rents were pushed to unsustainable levels by long upward-only leases, the correction has often come suddenly: a lease ends, the tenant leaves or renegotiates, and the rent resets to a much lower figure.

That is painful for whoever owned the building through the fall. But a rent that has already rebased to a level the occupier can sustain is a different proposition from one still sitting above the market and waiting to fall. Telling the two apart is a large part of the skill in buying retail now.

Supply

Prime pitches cannot be manufactured. In a historic city centre the buildings are listed, the street pattern is fixed, and nothing more can be built. The stock of prime frontage is what it is.

That constraint is a real feature of the asset. It is also why concentrated ownership along a single street matters. An owner with several buildings on the same stretch can shape the tenant mix and the character of the pitch rather than only reacting to it, which is what we have set out to do on Coney Street.

How to assess a pitch

Walk it, at different times of day and on different days. Notice which side of the street people use. Look at what is either side and what is opposite. Find the point where the flow breaks. Ask what the rent is, what it was, and what the last three lettings on that stretch were agreed at.

Photographs and a floor plan will not tell you any of this.