In the past 12 to 18 months, Workman Retail & Leisure and Workman Building Consultancy teams have advised on more than 6.5m sq. ft of shopping centre transactions.

Shopping centre acquisitions are back. After several years of subdued activity, investor appetite for retail assets is returning, with a series of  acquisitions  at the close of 2025 leading to more than £830m changing hands or nearing a deal – and with it, demand for due diligence that goes far beyond a schedule of defects, write Workman Partners Brendan Magee and James Taylor.

In the past 12 to 18 months, Workman Retail & Leisure and Workman Building Consultancy teams have advised on more than 6.5m sq. ft of shopping centre transactions. And the consistent theme across every instruction has been the same: buyers don’t just want to know what’s broken. They want to know what it will cost to operate and execute their vision, and what will hit their bottom line.

That shift in emphasis matters. In a more competitive acquisitions market, with agents predicting a continued hike in sales this year, the purpose of DD is less about identifying reasons to renegotiate, and more about giving buyers the confidence and clarity to move decisively.

Understanding the full financial picture – capex requirements, service charge implications, non-recoverable liabilities and maintenance forecasting – is increasingly what separates a winning bid from one that falters.

A building survey will always surface issues. The question is: which of them actually matter to the buyer’s business plan – and which can be managed out, without significant expense? At Workman, our Building Consultancy team takes a business-plan-first approach. Before assessing a defect’s cost, we assess its relevance. Context is everything.

Where defects are material, the focus shifts to sequencing and cost management. Rather than presenting a snapshot of current remediation costs – a figure that rarely reflects how a proactive landlord would actually manage a scheme – we build a realistic forecast of required expenditure, prioritised within a planned preventative maintenance (PPM) programme that aligns with the buyer’s intended holding period and asset strategy.

Critically, this requires understanding the lease profile. When leases expire, which retailers are likely to renew, and what void periods might look like, all shape how future expenditure can be timed and spread. Lease events create natural opportunities to carry out works, recover costs, and reposition space. A TDD report that ignores this is giving the buyer only half the picture.

Workman’s building consultancy team brings an expert layer of insight here. We are actively managing large-scale shopping centre refurbishment programmes, including ongoing work at some of the UK’s largest shopping centres, such as Lakeside and The Trafford Centre, which gives us an operational understanding of what major works really cost, and how they are best delivered. That live, hands-on experience goes well beyond what a desk-based cost estimate can provide.

For property management, the central DD question is how the buyer’s plans will interact with the service charge structure. A repositioning strategy – reconfiguring common parts, changing the retail mix, introducing new uses – can fundamentally alter how costs are apportioned across the occupier base, and how much of the total expenditure is recoverable.

Identifying what is capex and what is service charge recoverable is not always straightforward, and getting it wrong creates both financial and legal exposure. Workman’s property management team works closely with our building consultancy colleagues to model the full cost picture, ensuring buyers understand not just the size of expenditure, but how it will be funded, and by whom.

Julia Bower, our Director of Design for Management, emphasises the importance of service charge remodelling in acquisition due diligence, and the complexity of apportionment changes in repositioning scenarios:

“When a buyer is repositioning a centre, the service charge implications can be significant and are often underestimated at the DD stage,” she warns. “Reconfiguring common areas, changing the use mix, or introducing new services all affect how costs are apportioned across the occupier base, and what’s recoverable. Getting that modelling right early isn’t just good practice; it directly protects the business plan. Our Design for Management approach is built on this principle: the time to resolve apportionment complexity is before the design is fixed, not after the leases are signed.”

The question of how costs can be spread or forward-funded is also increasingly important in the context of the latest second-edition RICS service charge guidance, which sets new expectations around transparency, budgeting, and occupier communication. There is now far more pressure on delivering service charge recoverable works within a service charge year, rather than spreading those costs over several years. This is where having a detailed, costed 10-year planned preventative maintenance programme in place is vital, so that expenditure can be intentional, and spread strategically.

Shopping centre DD at this level of complexity requires property management and building consultancy to work as a single team, not in parallel silos. The lease profile informs the maintenance programme. The maintenance programme informs the service charge model. The service charge model shapes the business plan. Each element depends on the others.

Workman’s integrated approach – combining active property management experience with technical building expertise – means our DD advice is grounded in how shopping centres actually operate, not just how they look on paper. In a market where speed and certainty of execution matter, that’s the kind of insight that helps clients act with confidence.