To sell or not to sell...

The pub sector was gripped by speculation last week that Punch Taverns was looking to sell off up to 10 per cent of its estate in the run up to the English smoking ban.

Despite being unable to confirm a story that appeared in The Times, the notion of such a disposal had a distinct air of possibility about it.

A few weeks back I spoke to someone close to the nation's largest pub company who acknowledged that between 850 and 900 of the group's pubs would be 'badly' hit by the ban for the obvious reasons.

Despite this, selling such sites wasn't even hinted at. Nor did I pursue this line myself, for the simple - and I guess naïve - reason that I presumed that if Punch had considered selling them, it would have done so already.

But there's an old saying that there's never a bad time to sell a house and fair enough, if Punch gets what it regards as a good price for the sites then it doesn't matter that a profit-draining smoking ban is just around the corner. It becomes someone else's problem.

Still, while I'm no property expert - and in the absence of expertise in such a field perhaps someone will enlighten me - it strikes me that now is a rather odd time to be selling such a significant number of pubs.

It smacks somewhat of a firesale. As does Marston's apparent desire to offload up to 300 of its tenanted pubs.

I know shareholders and corporate progress come first, but the disposal now of these kind of pubs and in such numbers sends out an intriguing message about what business model suits a particular company. Not to mention the future livelihood of a thousand-plus tenants…