Higher Than Expected Town Centre Vacancy Rate – Council Owned Property 92% Occupied

Wrexham Council has a whopping 92% occupancy rate, with just two empty properties in the town centre – whereas 69 privately owned shops remain vacant.

An appendix to the report notes that the “Town Centre Vacancy Rate is higher than expected this quarter as a new more accurate recording system has been implemented with involvement from Manchester Metropolitan University’s ‘Innovate’ project.”

The performance considers all town-centre ground-floor units only.

The catchment area is defined as being within the inner ring road; this follows the border of Grosvenor Road, Bradley Road, Pentre Felin, Brook St, St Giles Way, Salop Road, Eagles Meadow outer ring, St. George’s Crescent, Bodhyfryd, and Powell Road. It also includes retail parks on the opposite side of these roads, such as Central and Border Retail Parks.

‘True picture’ figures are provided showing that there are 448 properties measured, with 26 Council owned and the remaining 422 privately owned.

Just 2 of the 26 Council owned properties are empty at the time of the data collection.

69 of the 422 private properties are vacant in the same time period.

That means just 2.8% of town centre vacancies are Council’s properties, the rest being private landlords.

Other positives for the Council noted in the report include:

• The percentage of municipal waste reused, recycled or composted ‘is very good’ at 69.18% and exceeds the Council’s statutory target of 64%.
• Customer satisfaction with all Council services has ‘significantly improved’ at 98%
• Wrexham as a location is stated as ‘generating a high level of investment enquiries’. This is attributed to ‘the prosperity that we are seeing in the county with a range of large projects such as 21st Century Schools, The Prison Development and the Welsh Housing Quality Standard investment’.

The report is to be discussed on the 21st of December, the penultimate public meeting for Councillors of 2016 with kick off at 1.15pm, and the last meeting of the day and the year being at 4pm.

Pic: Town in April

(This article was edited this evening after some duff maths from us as its 92% not 98%! Thanks to Dominic who can do maths better than us…!)