The stereotype image of the video gamer is someone rooted to a sofa while a TV flickers in a darkened living room or they’re up in their bedroom gazing fixedly at a PC screen while jabbing at mouse and keyboard.

However, it seems that video gaming is moving from solitary pastime to spectator sport with the emergence of ‘eSports’– and this is could be good news for property landlords.

Last year, the eSports market grew to $1.1bn. That was year-on-year growth of about 26% and the sector is forecast to jump up to around $2.3bn within three years according to Forbes. Growth is also being fuelled by the competitive nature of gaming: in 2019, Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite offered prize money of more than $100m for competitive tournaments.

And like mainstream sports, the best players of these games are also attracting an audience. First, this was through online platforms like YouTube and Twitch but now it’s moving to physical spaces ‘game arenas’ where you pay to watch and learn from the best players who are often competing as part of corporate sponsored teams.

And, like regular sports, if you prefer to play rather than watch there are smaller centres. In London this trend has seen the expansion of the Belong Gaming Arenas introduced by the retailer, Game, to sit alongside their traditional retail stores, and for Wanyoo to acquire their first UK gaming café on Charing Cross Road. Wanyoo is Asia’s largest gaming café chain with 1,000-plus cafes in more than 50 cities.

Revenue streams are driven by playing fees – typically £5-7 an hour – or the cost of admission if you’re watching your gaming heroes in arenas such as Gfinity eSports arena in Fulham Broadway. And, of course, there’s lots of scope for adding on food and drink offers.

On average, Wanyoo’s gamers stay in venues for 3-5 hours. While audience dwell times are shorter, the game developers are looking at how they can embed advertising in the same way that you have hoardings around a pitch in a televised football game with companies such as Bidstack bridging the gap between game developers and advertisers.

And the cross-fertilisation of the digital and real worlds doesn’t stop there: celebrities like Michael Jordan, Drake and Gareth Bale have made substantial investments into the eSports sector.

The good news for landlords is that these eSport centres don’t have any particular property requirements other than size; they have taken units on high street locations and shopping centres, and are not too precious about ground, first floor and basement spaces!

The global eSports audience is now estimated to be around 450m people and, of course, many of the gamers who cut their teeth on Counter Strike, Quake and SuperMario more than 20 years ago are still playing today so the sector has a strong demographic profile.

And, if you’re not sure that eSports are here to stay then consider this: they’re under consideration for inclusion at forthcoming Olympic Games.

H&M has a long track record of integrating ethics into its business notably with its ‘Conscious Collection’ line of clothing and also through its sustainable supply chain strategy. But during London Fashion Week one of its stores in the capital was the venue for a ‘Boycott Fashion’ protest.

The irony - and perhaps inappropriateness - of this was further emphasised shortly afterwards when H&M announced the launch of a new clothing rental service aimed at making premium items available at an affordable price and extending the use and lifecycle of garments.

H&M isn’t the first retailer to announce this sort of initiative - Banana Republic, Urban Outfitters, Scotch and Soda and Ann Taylor Loft have all launched subscription rental services this year -  but the negativity that the company is facing from the anti-fashion lobby has left its CEO, Karl-Johan Persson, exasperated. In an interview with Bloomberg, he warned that curtailing fashion retailing “may lead to a small environmental impact, but it will have terrible social consequences”. Perhaps not surprisingly, this only enraged his opponents further.

Britons buy more clothing than any other European country, and its estimated that £2.7bn is spent fashion that they only wear once so it’s not surprising that retailing is increasingly under scrutiny. And, of course, property has a similar challenge: the built environment is responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions in the UK.

So where property and retailing come together in the form shops it’s clear that we can make a difference in terms of how those spaces are created and operated. In London, major landlords such as Grosvenor, Shaftesbury and The Crown Estate are leading the way in this respect and retailers are responding to their lead.

In this context, it’s perhaps not surprising that streetwear brand Napapijri felt that Shaftesbury’s Carnaby Street was the right setting for its first London store. The brand recently launched ‘Infinity’: a 100% recyclable jacket that’s been made using recycled fishing nets and which you can ‘trade in’ after two years of use.

Given changing attitudes in society there is tremendous opportunities for retail and property to collaborate on sustainable responses to what shoppers demand. Hopefully, this week’s MAPIC retail property exhibition will generate many ideas which can support this process.

I went to a seminar organised by investment bank, Citi, recently that looked at investment trends in the F&B sector and inevitably in that environment and in the current climate, the conversation came up about big chains versus innovative independents - the latter increasingly outperforming the former.

In this context, it was great to have Billy Hookway from JKS and White Rabbit founder, Chris Miller, on the panel as, while very different, they share the same aim of achieving scale through repeated diversification rather than the more familiar tactic of simple replication. Both have finance or private equity expertise as a core part of the business but both are operators. Imbiba is another London-based investor/operator with multiple small brands under its banner. Perhaps this model could act as inspiration for some of the big chains which have the sites and the resources but seem to have run out of ideas - and customers.

It's undoubtedly more difficult to consistently come up with new ideas than it is to oversee a brand ‘roll-out’. However, if a business opens its door to new creative talent and sets itself up as investor as well as operator there is potentially an unlimited pool of ideas from which to choose.

It's certainly more in line with what customers want. Although restaurant groups have traditionally grown through faithful replication, the trend for some time has been for unique experiences.  And that’s ultimately why we’ve seen so many of the big brands fail recently.

Of course, there will always be room for a limited number of brands that can sustain ubiquity and be controlled at board level with a competent operational management firmly in place. But we’ve now seen that - outside the fast food and coffee sectors - that approach is increasingly unsustainable.

The independent sector, as ever, is where the innovation is, and that is what the customer wants.   The recent explosion of street food halls and similar formats are clear evidence of this- a response to demands for choice, quality and an experience- a reaction against boringness. 

So how can big institutional money tackle this challenge? While a board of accountants may be able to oversee a process of faithful replication,  growing a group while continuing to innovate is a completely different game and one you only get to play if you have the operational and creative expertise generally only found in the independent sector.

In London, for example, there are still numerous sites held by the big restaurant and pub groups that are considered ‘prime’ yet massively underperform in relative terms. This is to the detriment of customers, landlords and to the institutional owners of these businesses. Maybe it’s time for those groups to switch from ‘Operator Mode’ to ‘Investor Mode’ in certain cases. Instead of coasting along or selling the asset at a loss, perhaps they should first try partnering with an independent operator with proven success, who may hold the key to big profits but doesn’t have the funds for a big premium or the required capex.

In this scenario, everybody can win including landlords who retain the covenant strength of the ultimate owner of the asset.  In due course, these owners may find themselves with a stable of small, agile and innovative partners to invest in and work with, providing sites, staff, and capex and taking a share of the upside.  Deciding who to partner with is clearly the main consideration but if in doubt advice can be sought from people who know the sector intimately and have a firm grasp of the market.

Ultimately, as the trend increasingly veers towards independent talent, maybe that’s how the big money invested in the sector can ultimately get in on the action.

Nationally, cinema attendance levels have hit a 40-year high while in the capital one of its iconic cinemas – the Odeon Leicester Square – has recently re-opened after a multi-million pound refurbishment. Confidence in the sector is high and there’s good reasons why.

Many decades ago cinema was credited as having ‘killed off the music hall’, and its own slow demise was predicted in the face of first, television, and then digital downloads. Ironically, it is TV which is now arguably being more impacted by online entertainment although Netflix – which is supposed to bring the cinema into your front room - continues to haemorrhage money while the cinema chains count the takings.

The ability to ‘deliver an experience’ is the key to cinema’s resilience as a leisure pursuit. What the new Selfridges screen and the refitted Odeon have in common is that they want to offer an enhanced customer experience.

The Selfridges project is a joint venture with the people behind The Olympic cinema in Barnes. A quick perusal of its description of how the former recording studios were turned into a cinema (‘We went to Norway to find the comfiest reclining seats and then wrapped them in snuggly wool felt’) tells you about their approach.

And there’s a symmetry about a retailer branching out into cinema as both sectors know they have to provide an experience-led offer if they are to thrive. In this respect they are both complementary and aligned.

This ‘premium-isation’ of cinemas has started in the boutique end of the sector but it will inevitably spread to the multiplexes. Operators are striving to make sure that the cinema experience continues to beat watching a film in your living room.

After all, no matter how big your TV is, it’s no match for the silver screen.

When we completed our latest research into the London gym & fitness sector, it came as no surprise that London has the highest concentration of gyms in the UK. Demand continues to grow and in the face of this, landlords now have the opportunity to start thinking creatively about the way gyms are incorporated into wider residential or mixed-use developments.

Colliers International’s Central London Retail team has created a dedicated Brand Representation team in response to the growing numbers of retailers who want a presence in London.

Research from the firm shows that 17% more international brands have opened new stores in London since the EU referendum than they did in the two years preceding the vote.

The new Brand Representation team will be led by Peter Flint and Rob Hargreaves, who together will provide bespoke acquisition services across London and also advise on how brands can control their property costs.

Peter Flint of London Brand Representation at Colliers International comments: “London is a complex retail market and it is essential that brands – whether they are making their debut in the capital or expanding – get their strategy right.

“Brands are coming to us for advice because of the dual perspectives we have from advising brands such as Uniqlo, Inditex, LVMH, Jigsaw, Sweaty Betty, Laderach, and ECCO, as well as many of London’s major landlords. Understanding both sides of the equation is vital.”

Rob Hargreaves comments: “It’s an exciting time for London retail and it’s clear that brands are not being deterred from entering the market by continued Brexit uncertainty. The capital is still seen as one of world’s premier retail destinations by shoppers and retailers alike, despite the wider political and economic uncertainty.

“This dedicated Central London Brand Representation team ensures Colliers is better placed than ever to provide occupiers with unrivalled acquisition and portfolio strategy advice across the capital.”