From Family Restaurant to Rates and Rent

During Voice FM’s Your Green Breakfast, host Xan continues a week-long focus on Go Southampton’s Hospitality SOS campaign by interviewing commercial real estate professional Nella Pang, who has 20 years’ experience advising occupiers and landlords on sustainable property strategies.

Nella argues hospitality demand has not disappeared—people still want connection, community and experiences—but the economic model is broken: independent operators face rising labour and energy costs, increased national insurance contributions, business rates and tight single‑digit margins that are easily wiped out by fixed-cost increases.

She shares the example of her family business, Mama’s Kitchens at Southampton’s Guildhall, which reduced opening days and ultimately chose to close the physical site to focus on its street food van, as the van can earn in two hours what the venue might take in a weekend.

From a surveyor’s perspective, Nella explains how hospitality underpins city-centre footfall, supports surrounding retail and strengthens office demand; when venues close and Friday traffic drops due to hybrid working, the wider ecosystem weakens, affecting rental values, business rates revenues and investor confidence, while landlords also try to avoid vacancies.

She calls for wider stakeholder involvement—investors, lenders, developers, suppliers, producers, property owners and asset managers—highlighting employment impacts (especially for young people), asset performance and the social value of venues as community “glue.”

While she says institutional landlords and councils are increasingly listening, she stresses that government needs to change fiscal frameworks so independents can keep more money, warning that without recalibration, cities risk losing the independent businesses that make places like Southampton vibrant and attractive, despite the city’s strengths such as its universities and talent pipeline.