Surveyors may be too pessimistic about retail occupier prospects

Surveyors’ responses to last week’s RICS Commercial Property survey painted a downbeat picture of the prospects for the retail occupier market, which seems consistent with the weaker tone of today’s CBI Distributive Trades survey. However, while we think that retail rental values have further to fall in absolute terms, relative to the office and industrial sectors, we suspect that the outlook for retail property may be better than suggested by a first glance at RICS surveyors’ responses.