Serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson delivered a withering attack on landlords in the opening keynote speech at the BCSC conference this morning, demanding wholesale change to relations between landlords and tenants.
Johnson, who founded Strada and built Pizza Express, warned of ongoing disruption to the UK retail environment and accused landlords of intransigence.
Demanding an end to upwards-only rent reviews, a switch to monthly rents and transparent service charges, Johnson said: “The current landlord-tenant adversarial model is broken there will be many more insolvencies unless landlords compromise. We need to avoid a spiral of decline.
“If there isn’t wholesale change in some of the golden rules of the property industry we can only expect relentless difficulties.”
Johnson also warned that landlords were taking too big a slice of tenants’ profits: “When I started in restaurants and retail you were able to make twice what the landlord was making and that seems to have reversed. I’m not sure that’s right.”
And addressing the landlords in the room directly, he added. “If you want this to be a country where your children have jobs, we’re going to have to change. We can’t be a nation that makes our living by continuously selling assets to sovereign wealth funds.”
He also urged landlords to be more adventurous in their tenant mix. “Landlords need to think more about experiential than transactional. They need to be braver in looking for tenants – bars, nightclubs, bingo, karaoke, ping pong, play centres and so on.”
damian.wild@estatesgazette.com
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