White van man has been in the news a bit lately. He is being well looked after by Northgate. This is one of the clearer followers of macroeconomic trends, obviously, because of the small and medium-sized companies it serves.
There are three main drivers: how busy those SMEs are; to what extent they can be persuaded to rent rather than buy outright; and how fast it can expand its 73 sites in the UK.
Northgate is also heavily exposed to the Spanish economy, about a third of the company, which makes reading its progress more difficult. Here it is an advantage to rent, if you are an SME with understandable concerns that the small improvements in that economy may not be maintained.
The whole