Glasgow city centre has secured its position for having the second highest ranking commercial city in the league of 9,000 retail and leisure markets nationwide.
Property specialist Colliers inaugural LocateVenture report, which monitors the retail and leisure offering at commercial venues across the UK.
LocateVenues looks at metrics including venue type, brand presence and strength, vacancy and refurbishment rates, floorspace availability, price positioning (value vs luxury) and category mix.
The 9,000 venues in the research, which are defined as individual destinations, range from major city centres; local town and neighbourhood shopping streets; malls; designer outlets; retail and leisure parks; to standalone grocery stores, service stations; retail in rail stations, hospitals and business parks.
In comparing the data to venues in 2019, Manchester scooped the number one spot with the largest range of retail and leisure offering across the UK, in one shoppable location.
Glasgow came in second place followed by Leeds - Central, Birmingham - Central, and Liverpool – Central.
Edinburgh entered the top 10 this year, rising four places against the 2019 data, following the opening of St James’ Quarter which significantly enhanced the city’s retail and leisure offering.
Colliers’ LocateVenues data also reveals that local centres and high streets are out-performing some of the larger destinations in the recovery from COVID-19.
Smaller venues have grown by around 9% between 2019 and 2022.
Aviemore is the most tourism-based location in the ranking due to the town’s concentration of retail and leisure occupiers that cater to visitors. This includes museums, galleries, outdoor clothing and equipment retailers.
Ross Wilkie in the retail team at Colliers Scotland, said: “It’s no surprise to see Edinburgh’s rank improve as whilst it lost its international tourist draw during the pandemic, it did benefit from the increased popularity of staycations in the UK. The recent opening of the St James Quarter has significantly improved the retail and leisure offering in the city which had suffered for years as a consequence of having no dominant shopping location in the city centre.”
Paul Matthews, co-head of retail strategy & analytics at Colliers, added: “Data is now more important than ever as our clients navigate the consumer behaviour changes in response to COVID-19 and the continued evolution of shopping channel shift.”
“The shift to local shopping is also demonstrated in the change in occupier presence by venue type. Using LocateVenue’s proprietary weighted scoring mechanism based on occupier presence, the biggest growth took place for retail parks.”
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