It’s the kind of price tag usually associated with discount stores such as Poundland, but an entire Scottish shopping centre is to go under the hammer with a reserve price of just £1.

The Postings mall in Kirkcaldy, in which 14 of the 21 shops currently lie empty, is being auctioned by its City pension fund owner next month, according to the auctioneer’s website.

That a shopping centre could change hands for less than the cost of a short stay in its rooftop car park underlines the current high street crisis. While locals may worry about the growing number of empty stores in their town centre, the other side of the coin is the devastating impact on retail property values.

When it opened in 1981 the Postings, which cost £4.25m to build, promised to be a magnet for shoppers. Each store opening prompted local news, with 1980s TV celebrity and Generation Game presenter Isla St Clair even dropping in to cut the ribbon at the William Low store (a supermarket chain bought by Tesco in 1994) when it opened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Generation Game presenter Isla St Clair opened the William Low store in the Postings. Photograph: Chris Craymer/Rex Features

But the now dated precinct, in what is Gordon Brown’s former constituency, has fallen on hard times. It was dealt a big blow in 2015 when Tesco – despite personal protestations from Brown – closed the superstore which anchored the mall and also doubled as the town’s post office.

But the cost of the annual upkeep of the Postings is now thought to be higher than the £152,000 it brings in from rent, making its ultimate parent Columbia Threadneedle Investments eager to offload it after more than 15 years of ownership.

Columbia Threadneedle said the Postings had been acquired for its rental income stream but that it had now been repositioned as a development opportunity that “does not fit the holding fund’s investment strategy”.

Quite who would see it as a development opportunity is another matter.

Famed as the birthplace of the 18th-century economist Adam Smith, Kirkcaldy once had coal, textiles, linoleum and electronics. Today the biggest employers in the town of 49,000 people are the NHS and the council (which incidentally is the Postings’ most lucrative tenant, renting the car park for £70,000 a year). It has estates that are the most deprived in Scotland outside of Glasgow and in a recent interview with the Guardian, Brown revealed the number of families turning to its food banks had soared.

“What the price tag tells you is the relevance or rather the irrelevance of these dated shopping centres in challenged towns,” said Matthew Hopkinson, co-founder of retail advisory firm Didobi. “This is a very difficult time to be a property investor because the retail sector is going though major structural changes.”

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At the end of last year Fidelity International, the asset management firm, warned that large falls in retail property values could be on the horizon. In its report Adrian Benedict, Fidelity International’s real estate investment director, predicted the value of UK shopping centres, retail parks and high street stores could fall by 20%-70%. “Bricks-and-mortar retailers are in a fight for survival,” said Benedict. “Online shopping is transforming retail but at a time when consumption is struggling and the role of consumption in growth is waning.”

Last year was a difficult year for the retail sector with a long list of high street failures, including House of Fraser, Evans Cycles, Maplin and Poundworld, while other chains including Mothercare and Carpetright, together closed hundreds of underperforming stores.

There is some hope for the Postings, with Columbia Threadneedle reporting that the eye-catching price tag had created a lot of interest. “The reserve price of £1 is generating significant attention and we expect to get a considerable amount at the auction,” the company added in a statement.