Classification des centres commerciaux/malls (class A, class B, class C…)

Un papier intéressant de Thasos Group :
http://thasosgroup.com/wp-content/uploa … port-1.pdf

Ils arrivent à prédire le trafic dans les centres commerciaux à partir de la géolocalisation des téléphones portables : le trafic étant fortement corrélé aux ventes à périmètre constant, ils peuvent déduire celles-ci également. Dingue quand même.

Apparemment, ces derniers mois le critère clé pour maintenir le trafic dans un centre commercial est la présence d’une locomotive alimentaire avec des produits frais et de base :

Thasos Group a écrit :

Malls and community centers with grocery stores and other venues carrying consumer staples and less high-end discretionary goods are materially outperforming traditional malls, with a spread of 6% in terms of monthly YoY foot traffic through May 2017.

Thasos Group a écrit :

Malls with High-End Anchor Stores are underperforming malls with Low-End Anchor Stores by as much as 3% in terms of monthly YoY foot traffic through May 2017. This means that malls with Nordstrom and Macy’s anchors are losing foot traffic at nearly twice the rate as malls with J.C. Penney or Sears anchors on a monthly YoY basis through May 2017.

La dernière conférence téléphonique de Macerich nous éclaire sur la situation actuelle des centres commerciaux de classe A aux USA (et on devrait pouvoir extrapoler à la France au moins en tendance à moyen terme) : Macerich’s (MAC) CEO Art Coppola on Q3 2017 Results - Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha

Pour résumer très simplement :
1) Il y a de la demande pour des centres commerciaux de classe A.
2) La stratégie omnicanal est plébiscitée par les meilleures marques. Ceux qui vendaient en boutique vont sur internet, ceux qui étaient sur internet ouvrent des boutiques physiques. La foncière fait une veille permanente pour saisir les opportunités.
3) Les marques les plus faibles meurent, mais c’est l’occasion de remplacer les emplacements par des marques plus fortes, qui vendent plus et payent des loyers plus élevés.
4) Les vieux centres commerciaux étaient des collections de boutiques de fringues, parfois même sans toilettes, aujourd’hui il y a du divertissement (bowling, cinéma), des restaurants, du sport et des enseignes ultra-variées (par exemple avec du maquillage sur place).
5) D’une manière générale les gros emplacements sont remplacés par des emplacements plus petits, avec de meilleures ventes par surface et des loyers plus élevés.
6) Aucun problème de financement pour les centres commerciaux de classe A.

Donc pour moi on est tout à fait en phase avec ce qui avait déjà été dit dans cette file : pas de problèmes pour les centres commerciaux de qualité, pour les autres c’est à voir.

Un extrait de la conférence :

Art Coppola a écrit :

As you can tell from the facts that our operating results, our company continues to be - to perform at a very high level. However many folks tend to look at the glass as being half-empty instead of half full. Why is that? That’s because there is a major negative sentiment that we all know about retail, about our sector and about our company.

And after thinking about sentiments, so I looked at the definition of it and one of the popular definitions is that sentiment is a thought or view or attitude based upon emotion but not reason, emotion not reason. The facts are that our malls are counts were in high demand for retailers, they’re places of preference for shoppers and they are performing extremely well.

So what creates this negative sentiment? Well to a great extent it is the social media. Social media that is driven by folks that have somewhat of a contrarian a conflict of interest. Maybe they are bank stock, maybe there are hedge funds. And course every time that a retailer goes broke it’s always blamed upon e-commerce as being the reason.

In fact the reason with tenants tend to fail is because their brand has become irrelevant. They may be over levered and yes to some extent digital commerce may have accelerated their depth. In our company - in our portfolio the companies that have gone broke over the last couple of years averaged about $250 per square foot and they paid rents that are about 40% to 50% below the average rent in which they had stores.

Look it’s true that retail is being disrupted by digital commerce but is usually the retailers that should be disrupted. As I said before in my view and I’ll talk about this a little bit later, digital commerce is our friend. It is a breeding ground for new businesses and this will be the businesses that will fuel the excitement in our portfolio going forward.

Want to talk a little bit about the broader retail landscape. Much has been talked about the fact that there is too much GLA in the United States. That’s true but why doesn’t that bother in. Our portfolio is over 90% driven by town squares that represent and that occupy a place in the top 300 malls in the United States.

If you look at those top 300 malls in the United States, you’re looking at square footage that is about one half of 1% of all of the GLA in the United States and when you add in high demand street retail locations and other great retail locations, they occupy a place that is in the top 2% or 3% of all of the GLA in the United States. That’s why we have a very confident view on our future.

That’s true that malls are evolving but that’s good. If they were not evolving then they would in fact be a true to the social media that the mall is dying. But great malls in great locations are evolving.

If you think about the way malls were built going back 20 or 30 years ago, the profile generally look like this. They were suburban and location, amazingly 100% of the GLA on those properties was apparel. There was no food in those malls, there weren’t even any public bathrooms in those malls, there were very few amenities, there was no entertainment, there was no mixed used they were all full price but they did well.

But why did they do well? Because it didn’t have any competition. So now it’s competition has come from the digital landscape, as well as from people like Walmart then going back to digital Amazon, these malls did have to evolve in order to survive and the ones that are going to thrive of the ones that we own. These are now town squares and their profile is, they are in urban locations, a tremendous number of the properties that we own were never suburban. They were built in the middle of cities. They are in the last mile of distribution. They have a lot of food options in these centers. There’s lots of entertainment - location based entertainment whether it be theaters or destinations such as Legoland Crayola and other themed retailers.

There’s a tremendous amount of amenities in the properties. There are lifestyle uses, uses that are - such a SoulCycle, Equinox, Life Time Fitness, yoga and other uses of that nature. There is a tremendous amount of health and beauty in these malls in these town squares and there will be more. We didn’t use to have that in the malls that were built 20 years ago. There’s home furnishings and accessories for the home, retailers like Restoration Hardware used to be for home you had to go inside of a department store.

There’s the whole category of athleisure which didn’t exist as recently as 10 years ago. Inside the malls and attach to the malls there are sporting goods which used to be found only in side of Sears. Today we have great sporting good retailers such as Dick’s that occupy space.

There are mixed uses that want to be in these towns for us. Whether it be office, residential, medical, hospitality. There are major food users, such as Eataly. People like specialty food users, like whole foods, food halls and groceries.

These centers that we own are the new town squares or the new downtowns if you will. They are the preferred homes for the omnichannel digitally born vertically integrated retailers that are being born in the digital world today. So let’s talk about the future occupants of these malls and these are the digitally born vertically integrated retailers.

We spent a tremendous amount of time researching and surveying the landscape. We identified through a variety of criteria over 400 digital retailers that currently are doing business that we would like to do business with.

We then engaged with these retailers with an outside research firm and energy firm who would interview the founders and the CEOs of these companies. And the answers came back that they all want to be omni-channel which means that they want to gravitate towards brick-and-mortar over time.

The stores that they want tend to be the types of malls that we own they are all brands that are extremely well defined in the stores that they have opened or their expectations for the stores they average over $1,000 a square foot in volume. They have integrity to their profit margin because they are vertically integrated.

These will be the tenants that will make our mall exciting these emerging tenants will be the next generation superstars in our portfolio in terms of what they will produce for us whether it be sales productivity which will be high as a consequence of that they will be able to pay rents which are significantly higher than the retailers that are leaving us. They will generate a tremendous amount of traffic and they will be the heart and soul of the social network of our malls.