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A report launched last week by Colliers CRE at the Palace Hotel in Manchester shows that despite the vague scent of positivity that seems to be hanging in the air, retail landlords are still somewhat in the muck. Retail rents in the North West are expected to fall by 13.1% this year and by 7.6% next year, which sounds pretty bad, altough it's pretty much in line with national trends.

The Trafford Centre is one of only two places in the region where rents are static. The £400 per sq ft Zone A has been maintained in the face of falls in every other retail location in the region, except for tiny St Annes-on-Sea on the Fylde coast. I was in the Trafford Centre on Saturday and noticed a branch of Subway has been crammed in next to the Apple store on the upper level, which initially struck me as a bit bizarre but perhaps points to the management's willingness to experiment with tenants in order to keep deals ticking over.

Colliers' Nick McAllester says landlords in the North West have realised there is no advantage in seeing units stand empty and are willing to offer "soft" deals, including turnover-based agreements, in order to draw in retailers. These, alongside lengthy incentive packages, have led to a significant decrease in net effective rents.

My colleague Stacey Meadwell has taken some photos of Grosvenor's Liverpool One, which celebrates its 1st birthday today, showing that quite a few of the smaller retail units are yet to let. As can be seen here, there's a concentration of vacancies around the designer-led Peter's Lane part of the scheme. The photo was taken on a Friday morning earlier this month.

This bit of Liverpool One opened in the second phase last autumn and arguably hasn't been helped by the fact that the flagship Top Shop here has not yet opened. Once Top Shop opens during the summer, it's likely that footfall here will rocket, perhaps encouraging other retailers to move in.

Liverpool One's management has agreed monthly rent payments with some tenants although only one retailer - Principles - has so far been forced to close. Zavvi is now trading as Head, following a buy-out by former Zavvi chief executive Simon Douglas.

Grosvenor says the scheme is 96% let overall, while Liverpool has climed to 5th overall in the Experian retail rankings since Liverpool One opened.

Photo by Stacey Meadwell used under Creative Commons

I was at the EG Focus reception in Liverpool last night, ahead of the publication of the magazine's Merseyside features next month. We had a good turnout, despite managing to clash again with another event (a RICS pub quiz, of all things).

The venue in Liverpool was Kingdom, same as last year. It's a really swish place - lots of white leather sofas and ice buckets integrated into the tables, that sort of thing.

As regards the property market, the mood locally could be described as "cautious optimism" (if that isn't too much of a cliché). In previous recessions the city was savaged but I think everyone feels the impact this time won't be so severe, thanks to the continued wave of public and private investment that has poured in since the late-1990s.

On the new EG podcast (see below) you can hear me talking to Paul Rice, chief executive of the Liverpool Commercial District Partnership, who thinks the city is "set quite fair once the recovery starts". I also speak to David Sayer, head of GVA Grimley in the city. You'll need to listen quite carefully to David though, thanks to some technological misbehaviour on the part of my microphone.