Retail property market performance of cities: an investigation of the relationships between spatial configuration of consumer movement and changes in retail stock and value in Leeds, Newcastle and York

The influence of consumer activities on the performance of retail locations and retail property market in cities can be critical. This is because where and how retail consumers choose to transact influences the locational performance of retail property markets in cities. This study investigates relationships between consumer movement and the performance of retail property markets (RPM) between 2010 and 2017 in York, Leeds and Newcastle. The study adopts the spatial configuration (street segment) analysis technique to compute consumer movement patterns (CMP) on the sampled cities’ layouts using DepthMapX to obtain the CMP variables; specifically, integration, choice and NACH metrics. The RPM data were sourced from valuation summary lists belonging to the VOA dataset and analysed using MS Access and MS Excel to obtain RPM variables, namely, changes in retail rental value and changes in retail stock across locations. The study investigates the spatial and statistical relationships between the CMP and RPM variables of cities at mesoscales and macroscales using QGIS and SPSS tools, respectively. The spatial investigations visualise locational relationships between changes in RPM variables and the spatial accessibility index of the CMP variables. The statistical analyses adopted Spearman-rho coefficients to investigate the rank correlation between the RPM and CMP variables. Further statistical (multiple regression) analysis were undertaken to estimate the locational performance of the RPM (dependent variable) using the CMP (independent variables) across all the estimable city layouts. Findings show that there are significant relationships between changes in retail rental value and all the CMP variables at York mesoscale, Leeds mesoscale and Newcastle macroscale. The results indicate that the relationship between configured consumer movement and changes in retail rental value are influenced by scale and city characteristics. The research is the first to estimate the location performance of commercial property by way of spatial configuration analysis. The research outputs are useful tools for retail property market actors to make locational decisions on investments, occupation, development and the strategic management of urban retail space. The study recommends further studies on the prospects of spatial configuration analysis and other methods in estimating the future performance of the commercial property market for optimum utilisation and the management of urban resources