Now Trending: Emerging Retail Environments

It is no secret that there is a significant paradigm shift underway in the world of regional retail development. While it continues to be business as usual for some brick-and-mortar retail sectors, a major transformation continues to unfold across America’s regional retail landscape. When we take a closer look at the underlying fundamentals, we can yield some important insights about what is causing these changes, where regional malls are headed, and what developers must do to not only survive, but thrive in this new environment. Many regional enclosed malls are already dead, and hundreds more are dying slow deaths. At the same time, more and more open-air mixed-use retail environments are emerging — some of which are regional in nature, and all of which are competing directly with those enclosed regional malls. The best of these new projects have common characteristics: a significant portion of their public space is outdoors; non-retail leisure time components are a large component of the tenant mix; and non-retail uses like residential, office and hospitality are fully integrated into the design.

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