Queens Arcade was acquired as part of a portfolio in partnership with funds managed by Tristan Capital Partners. Queens Arcade is a covered shopping centre spanning 147,740 sq. ft. built in the early 1990s. It connected directly to St David’s, which offers an additional 1.42 million sq. ft. of modern retail space and a 2,000-space car park, The arcade is well located between Queen Street, St Davids and Working Street.
The centre struggled due to an oversupply of retail space in the city and falling demand. As retailers reduced their physical space over the following decade, much of Queens Arcade’s secondary retail accommodation became unlettable.
To address this, we collaborated with local planners to develop a residential led mixed-use scheme featuring a reduced retail footprint and a higher-density, predominantly residential redevelopment.
Our focus then became to create a pathway to vacant possession of the Arcade to facilitate the redevelopment scheme. Many tenants already occupied units on short-term flexible leases and the COVID pandemic accelerated the return of units with many tenant businesses failing or discontinuing trade at break or lease expiry. We developed a strategy to move the remaining lower-level mall tenants to the upper mall to allow us to close the lower mall. This strategy allowed us to half the service charge expenditure across the centre, saving £500,000pa and the closed units were deleted from the rating list saving a further £525,000 pa returning the scheme to a positive NOI.
The scheme was sold to Land Securities in 2024.
