An observation about freehold pubs coming onto the market

An observation about freehold pubs coming onto the market, mostly shut that is, when 'OFFICIAL figures for pub closures are supposed to be around 12 a week.

In the LAST SEVEN DAYS over 50, yes that's over FIFTY, 'New Instructions' for pubs have come into my inbox from just one national agent. Most of them are "Suitable for alternative use - STP". What does this mean against the 'official statistics?" NOTHING because at the moment they are still classed as pubs.

Of course there's no way of knowing what happens to all these pubs that are landsliding onto the market once they're off the agent's books (from experience I note that many of them stay on the market and the price falls over a period of several weeks, or couple of months, and then they slip away. I have a feeling that if they've been around for a while that they get recycled through other agents' networks to keep them below the parapet of scrutiny of the system by outside interested parties - who might want to be counting those pubs that stop being pubs to compare against the only source of pub closures the famously forthright upstanding and transparent BBPA.

'12 pub closures a week' is clearly a wildly optimistic figure conjured up to make the pub crisis seem not so much a crisis as a 'difficult period'. And the cliff hasn't even been washed away yet.