Roughly speaking, the property industry can be broken down into four big chunks: offices, residential, industrial and retail. And while they are all prey to the vagaries of the financial markets, sentiment, fads and cycles, the one at the coal face is retail because the well-being of its real estate is so tied up with the fate of its tenants, which in turn is largely dictated by the fickle nature of consumer trends.

What consumer preference has meant for property – from high streets to secondary centres – has been well documented. But there’s another way of coming at this relationship and it is one which is also midway through profound change.

When it comes to property finance, for many years the industry was something of a closed shop. Real estate specialists carried out most of the development and financed their schemes through direct investment, funds and institutional backing, notably from the pension industry. This had the advantage of retaining a high skills base but left the industry feeling it had been left on the fringes of the huge financial pot that supported some other sectors.

Then the boom got going, banks discovered real estate and the industry went on a spending spree which ended in 2008 with way too many highly leveraged, over-optimistically developed retail projects all over Europe.

The past five years has been spent unwinding the collateral damage. I was with Standard Life last week and they reckon we are about half way through a ten-year cycle as bank financing gets replaced by a far broader set of investors and debt providers. We have already seen a lot of Australian and Canadian money come into the UK – largely financed by their compulsory pension schemes - and the current wave has a distinctly American flavour to it.

Why does any of this matter to the retail industry? Because the new buyers will come in with money to slosh around doing up neglected schemes, reigniting the tenant mix and generally improving some very tired shopping centres. They want to see a return and they know to achieve that will take investment.

Standard Life was actually very optimistic about UK retail, especially outside London, while in a catch-up with LaSalle Investment Management recently head of retail asset management James Boyd-Phillips pointed to the secondary shopping centre market and predicted better things ahead. Indeed, even in that sector US money is behind some of the recent acquisitions.

The result, hopefully, is that as we get a gentle uptick in consumer confidence so we will also see an improvement in the retail destinations designed to entice shoppers. Lower exposure to highly geared bank finance should also mean that the days of highly speculative development are done and leave the incumbent UK’s malls less vulnerable to the type of dramatic collapse we saw in 2008.

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