- Remit Consulting reveals that 84.9% of rents were collected, 21 days after payments were due
- Overall collection rates remain around 12% below pre-pandemic levels
The latest research from Remit Consulting has revealed that, 21 days after the March quarter day due date, an average of 84.9% of the rent for commercial property had been paid by business occupiers to their landlords in the UK.
While the current quarter is seeing the highest rent collection rates for commercial properties witnessed so far during the pandemic, they are still around 12% lower than those recorded in March 2019, twelve months before the first Covid-19 lockdown.
“The start of the current quarter coincided with the lifting of the government's moratorium on the eviction of tenants for non-payment of rent, and it was hoped that this would see a substantial uplift in the collection of rent,” said Steph Yates of Remit Consulting
“However, it seems that while there has been an improvement, we are on a similar trajectory to the previous quarters of the pandemic and still significantly below the collection rates recorded pre-Covid,” she added.
The management consultancy’s ReMark Report reveals that, at 84.9%, the average collection rate of rent on commercial properties is five percentage points higher than at the same stage in December and four percentage points higher than after 21 days of the September quarter.
After 21 days of the current financial quarter, rent collection rates for retail properties stood at 85.6%, an increase of 8.6% compared to the same stage of the previous quarter.
Remit Consulting has been analysing the collection of rent and service charge payments by the country's largest property management firms since March 2020, working in conjunction with the British Property Federation (BPF), the RICS, Revo, the Property Advisors Forum, and other members of the Property Industry Alliance (PIA). The research covers around 125,000 leases on 31,500 prime commercial property investment properties across the country.
