Christie+Co's director of restaurants, Simon Chaplin, talks to the Morning Advertiser about the pub property market.
What's on your wish list on how the Government can help the market?
Giving financial assistance to country village pubs — pubs that provide a service to their local community that need some assistance to do that. Could you possibly have a lower VAT rate on food, because a lot of these pubs rely on food as they're destination pubs?
Is access to finance still a problem?
It's starting to get a lot better, but it's not as easy as it was back in the boom days of 2005 and 2006. But I would suggest that it's not a bad thing because it makes
people think twice about taking on a pub, over-paying for it and doing their homework before they start. One of the big problems we had when the market was roaring away was people taking over pubs that couldn't sustain them.
Has the political storm around pub companies deterred or impacted on people wanting to take on pubco sites?
The pub companies seem to have got better. They've got codes of practice and better leases. So for someone coming into the industry, going along to one of the pub companies, there is a lot of choice of agreements, which are a lot clearer now. I think there used to be this us and them culture, which has changed.
How do you think people view regional brewers?
Local brewers are very much the favoured item, certainly they don't seem to have as much of a problem with their tenancies and leases as some of the bigger pub companies because they've never had a bad reputation.
Has the type of buyer changed at all?
Only in that we've started to get some people who have wanted to run a pub because it's a way of life. Because of the current climate, you've got more people who look at a pub as a way of life — a home and an income. So we might see an increase in some transactions, maybe on the tenancies or the leaseholds, where there's a bit more support.
Do you see any new pub concepts on the horizon?
I think you're seeing a good pub getting better to get people through the door. There's no real concept coming through, apart from the growth of the gastropub. But this is more a pub that does food, relying on good, local produce. The edge of town, quality pub with good food is still going to be the one that's going to see the growth. And I think the managed house pub companies are going to drive that.