Hold, Improve, Reposition or Exit

Every option starts from the same base: what the building needs whatever path is chosen. Safety, current compliance obligations, items failing or causing damage. These are the floor. Even an owner who intends to sell must usually deal with some of them, or price them into the sale.

Above the floor, the paths diverge.

Holding as is means following the business-as-usual register: renew systems as they come due, defer consciously where sensible, keep the building competitive within its current market. Improving means adding works that raise performance within the current use: better controls, an energy upgrade, a lobby, end-of-trip facilities. Repositioning means accepting a larger programme to reach a different market or use, a deeper refurbishment, a conversion, a change of tenant type. Exiting means deciding what to do before sale, which uncertainties to resolve and which works to leave to the buyer.

The same register supports all four paths. What changes is which lines are taken up, when, and what is added.

Each path also carries different risk. Holding exposes the owner to obsolescence. Improving exposes them to whether the market rewards the improvement. Repositioning exposes them to construction, approvals and leasing risk. Exiting exposes them to what the next buyer will read.

For each path, set out four figures from the register: the base programme every path must fund; the additional works the path implies; the conditional allowances still open; and the timing against leases. Add a short note on the main risk each path carries. On one page, an owner can see the capital implication of each option on the same evidence, which is usually enough to narrow the choice to one or two before any detailed feasibility work begins.

Sometimes the evidence points beyond all four. When the capital needed to keep a building competitive approaches what it can earn, and the land supports something else, redevelopment becomes the rational path, as When the Building is Not the Asset describes. A good capital strategy says so plainly when it is true.

The most visible recent test of this decision is Marks & Spencer’s store at Marble Arch on London’s Oxford Street. The retailer applied in 2021 to demolish the 1930s building and replace it with a new nine-storey building of shops and offices, arguing that the existing store could not be adapted. Westminster approved the scheme, but the government called it in, and in July 2023 the then Secretary of State refused it, citing among other things whether refurbishment had been properly explored and the embodied carbon of demolition.

In March 2024 the High Court quashed that refusal, finding that national planning policy had been misapplied. In December 2024 the decision was remade and permission granted. The case did not settle the general question of retrofit against rebuild, but it made one thing plain: the case for redevelopment now has to be argued from evidence about the existing building, including what refurbishment could achieve and at what carbon and capital cost.

For an owner weighing the four paths, the lesson is that exit by redevelopment is no longer a quiet choice in many cities. The register that shows what the existing building needs, and what it could become, is the evidence such a decision will be asked for.

Owners compare paths through the register: the base they must fund anyway, the additional programme each path implies, the uncertainty that remains, and the timing against leases and plans. The comparison does not need to be elaborate to be useful. What matters is that each option is costed and timed on the same evidence.

This is also where the ideas in Capital Made Physical become practical. Whether a building should be held, improved, repositioned or sold depends in part on the forces in Part I and the futures in Part II. The register brings those general arguments down to one building’s options.