As city centres decline, an online future beckons for the humble NCP car park

Councils are looking to get people out of their cars (PA Archive)

Car parks aren’t the most exciting side of urban life, but in the property world, they’re causing a stir.

Covid has been a disaster for their owners, with the numbers of shoppers driving into town centres plunging under lockdown rules. Revenues have collapsed.

The biggest in the business, NCP, is on the cusp of forcing its landlords to accept a restructuring plan that will leave them substantially out of pocket.

Now, at the last minute, SoftBank-backed US car parks rival REEF Technology has piled in with a takeover bid, Sky News has reported.

Reef, it seems, has teamed up with Bain Capital Credit, part of the Bain private equity group, to launch an offer including a £150 million unsecured loan.

Now, why would they do that? You can bet they’re not banking on a looming golden era for Britain’s old town centres.

Property investors see little future in car parks, particularly in London. Online shopping, work-from-home and local green policies to squeeze people out of their cars make them increasingly redundant.

But the potential to turn them to other uses abound.

In the US, they’ve been turned into “dark kitchens” for the equivalents of Britain’s Deliveroo to make meals close to their customers.

Here, particularly London where central space is so hard to find, car parks could make ideal locations for warehouses for the “last mile” of deliveries from online shopping websites to customers’ doors.

British Land is belatedly moving into this field, seeing the city centre logistics play as the least crowded in a market that has seen Segro, Tritax and other warehouse specialists make a fortune in recent years.

REEF’s backer Bain Capital has no doubt seen private equity rival Blackstone’s big push into e-commerce warehousing and can see the logic.

As car parks change focus from bricks and mortar shoppers to Amazon, they serve as poignant symbols of the crisis facing our town centres.

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