A listview has a standard ''no items found'' message when it is empty. It is possibly to change this to something else, but only throughout your whole application. It would be nice to specify an ''empty list message'' for each listview.
If you ask me anything that can contain an entity in Mendix, things like lists / views / template grids / grids should have the possibility of selecting specialization templates, including a default specialization of "empty" this way you can just create a flexible display for when no entity is retrieved. Perhaps even include a microflow button or whatever.
This is achievable with CSS now, but it would be great to have this as a built-in feature!