Our sister publication NREI takes a look at the forecast for shopping center owners. The site recently relaunched. The redesigned home page is here.
The breadth of the closings has caught the industry off-guard. “The industry believed that you were just going to see the Home Depots of the world, the furniture stores, the ‘Granite counter tops are us'-type retailers get hurt. They are surprised to see how quickly it spread to other types of retailers,” says Suzanne Mulvee, a senior real estate economist with PPR.Of the store closings tracked by PPR, 46% are located in malls and about 43% in strip centers, with the remaining stores tied to big-box retailers. The current retail vacancy rate nationally is 11.8%, according to PPR. The firm forecasts the vacancy rate to rise to approximately 13% by the end of 2008 and 14% by late 2009.
Considering the softer occupancy, PPR expects rent increases in the retail sector to decline 1.7% this year, which means landlords will have to give back the 1.7% rent growth seen in 2007. PPR forecasts retail rents to drop 0.5% in 2009.
One beneficiary of the rising number of store closings is Lake Success, N.Y.-based Excess Space Retail Services, which helps retailers restructure leases and dispose of unwanted properties. Excess Space expects to work on 3,000 or more store lease restructurings this year, a 50% increase from the 2,000 restructurings the company worked on last year.
“Business is booming. It will be very robust for us this year and for sometime into the future,” says Michael Weiner, president and CEO of Excess Space.