That most men hate malls, and shopping in general, is a well-known maxim in the retail industry. Anecdotal evidence would point to the fact that men often consider going into a store a sort of punishment and statistical evidence says one in five men would rather do their taxes than go shopping. As a result, most malls in the U.S. still cater to women, in spite of some barely successful tries over the years to lure in men with promises of beer and cookies.
A bold European developer, however, is attempting to challenge the wisdom that men simply won’t enjoy shopping by building a mall that caters exclusively to the male population. The upcoming Panska Pasaz in Prague, buing built by Metroslav, will be tenanted by high-end men’s stores, especially those that specialize in tailored suits. There will also be a wine market on site.
Here’s the property’s Facebook page. It’s in Czech, but you can see the renderings and some of the posted press releases seem to be in English.
U.S. mall developers have been thinking up ways in recent years to make their properties more relevant to a wider range of consumers. It will be interesting to see how successful the Panska Pasaz experiment turns out to be. If it finally hits on the formula of how to get men into a mall, it might be worth replicating here.
ICSC’s 2011 RECon show is officially underway. The real action starts tomorrow when the Leasing Mall opens. Today there were a handful of sessions and networking opportunities. And, of course, the cocktail parties will begin shortly.
Retail Traffic–with an assist from our sister publication National Real Estate Investor–will be providing continuing coverage of the conference in a variety of ways.
I’ll be posting updates here at the Traffic Court blog. I’ll also be Tweeting from the conference floor. (You can follow me here. And don’t forget to monitor the #RECon hashtag to see the posts from everyone that’s Tweeting from the show.) Lastly, you can read our coverage on your smartphones at on our mobile site.
And if you just want to see everything we’re publishing in one convenient place, keep checking our special ICSC RECon 2011 Conference Coverage page. There, you’ll find all the news and analysis pieces we’ll file from the show floor in addition to a feed from this blog, my most recent Twitter posts and links to Jones Lang LaSalle’s ICSC blog. We’ll also be shooting some videos from the show floor. Those will start appearing Tuesday evening and Wednesday and we’ll continue to post them after the show’s over as we get them all edited.
We’ll be recapping all this coverage in our weekly newsletter–which we’ll send Wednesday morning. And then next week we’ll have one last look back at the show, which will include links to all the video interviews we put together in the next few days.
I don’t know what’s worse for the guy–the fact that this happened or the fact that the video is now going viral.
Up until the last moment, this had the makings of being the classiest thing to ever happen to a Cinnabon. The dude did everything right. He dressed up. He had wonderful things to say. He got a guy on acoustic guitar to help serenade her. In the process, he managed to turn the Sherman Oaks Galleria mall food court into a romantic spot.
Alas, it all breaks down at the end. As one of the people on the video says, “That was brutal.”
It’s difficult not be fascinated by the “candidacy” of Donald Trump. He’s managed to keep his names in the headlines for weeks–propelled a great deal by joining the absurd birther bandwagon–along with the whole “will he or won’t he?” speculation surrounding him.
But is there real meat to his candidacy or is it all just a big sideshow distracting us from real issues? For a brief moment, Trump was scoring quite well in Republican straw polls. That moment seems to have passed.
Last month we found him leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he’s dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul.
Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.
But judging by the names in the field, there could be more twists and turns to come.
Aside from his attractiveness to voters, I’ve always been curious about the perception of Trump within the commercial real estate industry. He’s become a brand name and is arguably the most well-known person from the industry in the country thanks to his tabloid-worthy personal life and his beyond gaudy successes and failures dotting the industry landscape.
But in my time covering commercial real estate, Trump is largely a non-story. I don’t hear many people talk about him nor look at him as some kind of model. Within the industry, the people that are admired–and that have experienced success and wealth well beyond Trump–are folks like Sam Zell, the Simons, Steve Roth, Stephen Ross, and many others. Trump is an entertainer. Those other guys are businessmen.
By 68 percent to 14 percent, the billionaire is viewed unfavorably by respondents in a Bloomberg Global Poll of investors, analysts and traders. In the U.S., where Trump is more widely known, his unfavorable rating climbs to 79 percent, while those viewing him favorably rises to 17 percent.
“The last thing this country needs is an uber-political, self-serving, egomaniacal media junkie whose all-sizzle-no-steak approach to life and politics only distracts us all from the real issues and problems of our country,” said poll respondent Douglas Schoninger, 50, president of DJS Capital Management Inc. in New York.
So, as pros in commercial real estate, what do you think of Citizen Trump?
In 1989, Michael Galinsky toured malls across America and snapped pictures. He took those rolls of film and turned them into a slideshow he screened for friends. Now–more than 20 years later–he’s uploaded that online. It provides a snapshot of what the industry–and mall culture–looked like at the time.
Galinsky hopes to turn the project into a book. He’s uploaded this in part to help raise funds for the project.
I have always thought that images gain much more meaning with time. Looking at the mall slides it’s clear that their time has come. Last fall, I took them out, borrowed a scanner and loaded in about 160 of the stronger images. I posted a few on facebook and they got a great response. I started to work on putting together a book.
About 12 years ago, I published a book of rock photos called Scraps. I paired the images with short essays that friends wrote about being in bands, touring, and art in general. I wanted to do the same kind of thing with this book.
About a month ago, while waiting for the writers to write, I noticed some amazing Bruce Davidson subway photos on my brother-in-law’s facebook page. They had been linked to a site called How to be a Retronaut. I figured the site would like my mall photos. I figured right. What I didn’t realize was how the images would connect. The site didn’t bother to tell me that they had posted them, but I found out when other sites began to re-post them. In a couple of days, the photos had been shared on facebook and twitter thousands of times. In fact, they were so popular that they crashed the Retronaut site a few times.
With this campaign, I want to fund the printing of a run of books. Funders can get a book, a print, or a book and a print. I need to pre-sell 500 books to pay for this run.
The combination of being in production on a lot of things along with a terrible cold has made it difficult to get updates up here.
But we’ll definitely get back to our regular posting schedule as soon as possible.
In the mean time–if you haven’t seen this already–here’s a video that’s been making the rounds this week. Mall owners may want to put some guardrails around their fountains for people like this.
What happens when you build a giant mall and nobody comes? That’s what they’re finding out in Dongguan, China at the New South China Mall.
Bloomberg takes a look at the current largest mall in the world–which, by all accounts, has been a disaster. It’s been mostly empty since it opened and this short segment shows what the center looks like on its “busiest” day of the week and why it’s had so many issues.
The problems are manifold. Since the South China Mall is situated in a suburb, it is borderline inaccessible to the vast majority of Chinese residents who don’t have cars. (There are only 11.5 million cars owned by individuals in all of China.) To say the least, foot traffic has not been brisk. A Bloomberg News account of the property in mid-April described the mall as “almost deserted.” The property’s planners anticipated 100,000 shoppers a day would pass through the property. But a mall spokesperon acknowledged that foot traffic is currently just one-tenth that amount.
What’s more, observers say, the property has a patched together feel and violates many of the fundamentals of mall design — some laid down at the dawn of the mall era. “You see corridors with blind spots hiding tenants,” explains Ross Glickman, chairman and CEO of Urban Retail Properties in Chicago. “You see corridors ending in walls.”
With the mall struggling so much two years after its opening, some wonder if it will ever live up to the initial hype. (For its part, Dongguan San Yuan says the mall is still in a “development phase” and expects its sales performance to improve.)
Sounds like things haven’t changed. At all.
(Hat tip to Coy Davidson, who tweeted the link a few minutes a go.)
Hey folks. It occurred to me today that it has been a painfully long time since I updated the Traffic Court blog roll. I am positive that some of the links on our list have now expired. And I know other very good commercial real estate and retail real estate blogs have emerged since the last time I really updated that list.
So if you know of good blogs for the space (or produce one yourself), let us know in the comments section, Tweeting it to us or sending me an email directly.
Retail real estate execs are always on the prowl to find the rare retailers willing to expand in today’s climate. So there’s some doubly good news on that front from GNC today.
The vitamin and nutrition specialty retailer is planning a $350 million IPO that will help facilitate its plans to open 4,800 company-owned and franchised locations to its store base. The firm currently has 7,100 locations. So this would represent a fairly sizable increase in its portfolio. Its expansion plans also will move it more aggressively overseas, including into China.
There is no timeline for how quickly it would like to add those stores. But that’s an aggressive target no matter how you slice it.
Here are some other news and notes from around the retail real estate world.
Investors in commercial real estate funds that lost money in the current downturn can take heart: their fund managers might be forced to recoup at least some of their losses. Bloomberg reports that private equity firm the Blackstone Group has returned $3 million to investors in its Blackstone Real Estate Partners International LP, as a result of so-called “clawback” provisions. Next quarter, Blackstone might end up paying more than $15 million to investors in another real estate fund. For this and other stories about retail and retail real estate, follow the links below:
Follow Retail Traffic at RECon
by David Bodamer May 22nd, 2011
ICSC’s 2011 RECon show is officially underway. The real action starts tomorrow when the Leasing Mall opens. Today there were a handful of sessions and networking opportunities. And, of course, the cocktail parties will begin shortly.
Retail Traffic–with an assist from our sister publication National Real Estate Investor–will be providing continuing coverage of the conference in a variety of ways.
I’ll be posting updates here at the Traffic Court blog. I’ll also be Tweeting from the conference floor. (You can follow me here. And don’t forget to monitor the #RECon hashtag to see the posts from everyone that’s Tweeting from the show.) Lastly, you can read our coverage on your smartphones at on our mobile site.
And if you just want to see everything we’re publishing in one convenient place, keep checking our special ICSC RECon 2011 Conference Coverage page. There, you’ll find all the news and analysis pieces we’ll file from the show floor in addition to a feed from this blog, my most recent Twitter posts and links to Jones Lang LaSalle’s ICSC blog. We’ll also be shooting some videos from the show floor. Those will start appearing Tuesday evening and Wednesday and we’ll continue to post them after the show’s over as we get them all edited.
We’ll be recapping all this coverage in our weekly newsletter–which we’ll send Wednesday morning. And then next week we’ll have one last look back at the show, which will include links to all the video interviews we put together in the next few days.
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