Low Vacancies, Tenant Demand, Rents Up: The Story Of Retail’s Best-Kept Secret

With the future of the 400-store Wilko chain on the brink, the UK’s retail landlords are braced for the possibility of another stalwart retail chain hitting the buffers.

But in the country’s booming retail park sector, even the prospect of 5.5M SF being released to the market is unlikely to see many landlords bat an eyelid, with a market often perceived as one of retail’s less glamorous enjoying soaring demand and the real prospect of rental growth. 

Out-of-town and edge-of-town retail parks are proving increasingly attractive to institutional investors because of the sector’s perceived safe haven status, growing tenant diversity and the relative lack of capital expenditure they require.

Yet even now, investor demand in 2023 does not seem to reflect the increasingly robust fundamentals that are making retail parks stand out in a recovering asset class.

Large investors have gotten on board with retail parks. The likes of the U.S.' Realty Income Corp., British Land, Columbia Threadneedle, CBRE Investment Management and Aviva Investors are in acquisition mode,…

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Weekend Interview: Urban Partners’ Claus Mathisen On How To Help Cities Solve Humanity’s Problems

This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities that keep CRE interesting.

For Urban Partners CEO Claus Mathisen, the solution to humanity’s key challenges will be found in cities. But cities have their own problems that need solving first. 

The Copenhagen, Denmark-based investor has grown from humble beginnings as a small fund manager targeting the Nordics to become one of Europe’s most successful investment managers. Urban Partners has €19B of assets under management across the Nordic region, Germany and Poland, and earlier this year it raised €3.65B ($3.95B, £3.12B) for its fifth value-add fund, even as real estate fundraising generally fell off a cliff. 

It has pulled this off by putting sustainability at the centre of its strategy, getting ahead of the curve when it comes to the increased focus from big investors and governments on cutting real estate’s carbon emissions. At New York Climate Week in September, for the second year in a row, the company will host an industrywide conference, gathering investors with $500B in unlisted real estate assets under management under a Leaders of the Urban Future banner.

In the last few years, Urban Partners has increasingly focused on large-scale, mixed-use urban developments and the problems facing cities. That is why it rebranded from NREP to Urban Partners in May 2023, bringing together four different platforms focusing on value-add real estate, real estate lending, venture capital tech investing…

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