Today has seen another new name added to the Exeter retail line-up – Virgin Media have opened a store in High Street, right in the heart of the City Centre. The Virgin Media store is the third new store to open in the City Centre during the last week, following hot-on-the-heels of JD Sports (in Princesshay) and Two Seasons (in Bedford Street).

Any new store opening is good news, but the Virgin Media store opening isn’t just a one-off. The latest survey of vacant City Centre retail units undertaken by my office (details set out below) shows a significant drop in the City Centre retail vacancy rate in November for the first time in 15 months. Clearly things could take a turn for the worse again, but it does really begin to feel as though things are beginning to move in the right direction. The percentage of City Centre units now lying empty stands at just 6.88%, considerably less than the national average, and, to date, the Christmas trading news filtering out from retailers is encouraging, with most reporting sales up on this time last year. And it’s not as if we’ve suddenly seen a batch of new stores opening with there having been no good news to report during the early Autumn – businesses such as Carluccio’s, which opened in September, don’t back anything other than competitive, winning centres and November saw new stores in the city for Chatham Marine (Bedford Street), Shake Away (Guildhall Shopping Centre) and Castle Galleries (Cathedral Yard), to name just three.

Although I’m far from complacent, I’m increasingly confident that there will be more new store announcements in the first quarter of 2010. Just catching-up on discussions in relation to attracting a new tenant to the former Woolworths unit this morning, I’m told that negotiations are in the final stages, with an announcement on a new tenant for that site likely in the new year.

Exeter isn’t immune from a challenging national economic picture, but we’ve performed well in comparison to many other town and city centres to date. We can look forward to the trend of positive store announcements continuing in to 2010.

John Harvey 11/12/2009