In the retail sector, vacancy rates have climbed and rent increases have slowed for the past year. The vacancy rate at malls in the top 76 U.S. markets rose to 6.6% in the third quarter, up from 6.3% in the previous quarter, to its highest level since late 2001, according to Reis.

For strip centers and other open-air shopping venues, the vacancy rate climbed to 8.4% in the third quarter from 8.1% in the second quarter. That marks the highest rate since 1994, according to Reis. Meanwhile, retailers’ closures outpaced new leases by 2.8 million square feet in U.S. strip centers in the third quarter, the third consecutive quarterly net decline. It is the first nine-month period of so-called negative net absorption since Reis started tracking the data in 1980.

The combined vacancy rate for malls and strip centers in the third quarter was 8%, up from 7.8% in the second quarter. Vacancy tends to be higher in strip centers during economic slowdowns because they have more independent, local tenants, which are more vulnerable to drops in sales than are the national retailers found in malls.

Link.

Updated at 2:13 PM

(Crain’s) — General Growth Properties Inc. has come under fire for asking to be included on the short-selling ban list while its executives were dumping shares.

Proxy adviser Glass Lewis & Co., in a note to investors Wednesday, said the Chicago-based mall owner’s action amounted to “rigging the system” and called for General Growth to be removed from the no-short list, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

The short-selling ban was due to expire Friday, but has been extended.

“Since electing to be added to the no-short list of ‘financial’ companies, General insiders have sold $40 million in shares,” wrote Todd Fernandez, a senior research analyst with San Francisco-based Glass Lewis, according to Bloomberg. “We see that as rigging the system and hope General would do shareholders a favor and remove itself from the list.”

This is another piece of bad news for the company. We summed up the issues that have hit the firm in recent weeks yesterday.

As I write this, General Growth’s stock is down 35 percent on the day to $9.46 per share. It bottomed at $8.38 per share earlier today–about $6 below its previous 52-week low.

Update: Bloomberg has more.

At The Oaks shopping center in Thousand Oaks, community health education seminars are being presented twice a month by Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in cooperation with the mall’s owner.

“We thought this might be monthly, but there’s such a great demand for health information, especially in the senior category, we had to go to twice a month,” said Kris Carraway-Bowman, the medical center’s vice president of marketing and public relations.

About 60 to 120 people are in the audience for most of the classes, up from 20 who participated when the sessions began earlier this year at the mall, which is undergoing renovation and expansion.

On a recent morning, a health seminar was under way in the lower-level courtyard as mall construction workers in hard hats sipped coffee, moms pushed strollers, a teen hobbled on crutches and a man talked on his cell phone.

Link.

AP reporter (and frequent Retail Traffic contributor) Lauren Shepherd has an interesting story about how restaurants are negotiating for better terms from landlords. Landlords are pushing back, however.

“Landlords are being fairly aggressive now,” said David Litchman, chief executive of Pockets, a sandwich and salad chain based in Chicago. “Now we’re getting many, many more deals come across the table.”

As gas prices have jumped to record levels and confidence in the economy has tanked among consumers, spending has slowed down and led to lower sales and profits at restaurants and retailers. That’s led to some pain for landlords, because companies have less money to expand.

Meanwhile, lenders have become more cautious on extending credit to restaurant franchisees, further constraining growth in the industry.

With less credit available and a decline in growth overall for restaurants, landlords have been more willing to offer incentives like tenant improvement packages, in which a landlord offers tenants money to improve the property in exchange for a lease.

Some landlords, meanwhile, are keeping rents consistent rather than raising them.

“They’re saying, ‘If we can just hold our own for a year or two, we’ll kind of be out of the woodwork’,” said leasing consultant Dale Willerton, CEO of The Lease Coach.

Consumers who use more than one channel when shopping for goods overwhelmingly prefer to move from online to brick-and-mortar locations, according to a new study from IBM.

According to the study, 75% prefer to move from clicks to bricks when shopping, while 7% reverse the direction, looking at items in person before buying them online. Three percent look online before engaging a contact center. These figures held regardless of whether shoppers were based in the United States or the United Kingdom.

But while the online-to-contact center crowd may be small, it’s valuable. This group spends the most when making purchases, at least among U.S. based consumers. Within the U.K., the big spenders were those who moved from online to mobile channels.

Link.

Apparently tired of what it believes to be a too-low valuation in the stock market, General Growth put out a release this morning saying it “pursuing a comprehensive evaluation of its alternatives, both financial and strategic, in an effort to align the market value of the Company’s common stock more closely with the intrinsic value of the Company’s stable, high quality portfolio of real estate assets.”

The company added, it will be in a position to offer “long-term fixed-rate portfolio mortgage financing to lenders in mid to late November, and in the interim will actively pursue several sources of financing for the Company’s near term maturing obligations. The Company and its advisors are also developing a comprehensive, strategic plan to generate capital from a variety of potential sources including, but not limited to, both core and non-core asset sales, the sale of joint venture or preferred equity in selected pools of its assets, a corporate level capital infusion, and/or strategic business combinations.”

Update 7:00 PM: General Growth did not do well in trading on Monday. It seems the market didn’t like this announcement. Most stocks were down, but General Growth was done more than most.

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - About 20 janitors are staging a one-day strike at Park Meadows Mall in suburban Denver.

The Service Employees International Union went on strike Tuesday.

The union says the mall’s cleaning contractor has been making it difficult for workers to organize. It says union supporters have been put under surveillance and workers have been told not to talk to union representatives.

A telephone message left for a company spokesman wasn’t immediately returned.

SEIU says the strike is one of 20 demonstrations planned at malls nationwide owned by Chicago-based General Growth Properties. Top of page.

Link.

For background on SEIU’s campaign, check out our October 2007 story.

The Detroit Free Press has a short, but nice, profile of Agree Realty Trust up.

Agree Realty Corp., a 10-person development firm based in Farmington Hills, has built a strong and growing portfolio of small retail centers housing Walgreen’s, Meijer, Borders and other retailers who offer consumers the basics of everyday shopping.

That sort of development doesn’t generate a lot of headlines in the style of, say, Donald Trump’s projects. But the firm’s relatively anonymity is just fine with the father-son team that runs the firm, Richard and Joey Agree.

“Our core business is developing brick-and-mortar locations for retailers. It’s a bread-and-butter business,” Joey Agree, 29, the firm’s executive vice president, said recently. “We’re able to minimize our risk while having the rewards underlying real estate.”

This interesting analysis comes via one of our sister publications Multichannel Merchant. It looks at how Steve & Barry’s did not do a very good job collecting and analyzing data on its customers.

Steve & Barry’s does allow customers to sign up for e-mail notifications, but asks them solely for an e-mail address. No age-brackets, no income ranges, no idea the sex of the registrant. And without an e-commerce aspect or a loyalty program, it has no idea what its customer is… or was.

Selling $14.98 sneakers was a great addition to the low-price inventory. Marbury’s idea was to sell a quality pair of basketball shoes that those less well off can afford. And the line expanded to running shoes, cross-trainers casual urban footwear.

But how many of those shoes were sold to the intended audience, and how many were bought by a 30-something writer and editor looking for a cheap pair of kicks?

• August 14, 2008, Steve & Barry’s Landlords Fight Sale
• August 5, 2008, Steve & Barry’s Sells for $163M
• July 14, 2008, More Retailer News
• July 14, 2008, Playing Serious Catch-Up
• July 8, 2008, The Fate of Steve & Barry’s
• July 1, 2008, Steve & Barry’s May Close Stores
• June 23, 2008, Steve & Barry’s Cash Crunch

In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned restrictions on picketing imposed by a company that manages shopping centers in Santa Cruz and Sacramento.

The decision follows a California Supreme Court ruling in December that declared unions have the right under state law to leaflet in malls and ask shoppers to boycott stores. By contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not protect freedom of speech in malls or any other private property.

Monday’s ruling addressed issues the state court did not consider, such as a shopping center’s ban on picket signs and on demonstrating at certain times of the year. A union lawyer in the case said the decision should send a message to mall management.

“Hopefully, now the malls will understand that they do have to accommodate criticism of the tenants (stores) and themselves,” said Sandra Benson, attorney for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

Link.