In the first quarter, over 400,000 sqm of retail space was under construction. The situation changed quickly and instead of developing, shopping centers began to struggle to survive and had to significantly adapt their operation to the restrictions, negotiate terms of contracts with tenants and look for savings.
After the first loosening of the restrictions in the third quarter of this year, consumption increased by 0.4% year-on-year, as compared to a decline of 10.8% in the second quarter. A little over a month after the reopening of the gallery, as many as 6 out of 10 Poles took the opportunity to visit them at least once. This quick revival of consumer footfall activity brought a lot of optimism to the market.
The pandemic, however, is not only about decreases and slowdowns in sales, it is also a time to improve other channels of reaching customers and looking for development opportunities. In our opinion, this translates into two directions: e-commerce and increased interest in new sales channels among retail chains, and their search for traditional, but so far forgotten commercial places. Such are, for example, the main streets of cities, spaces in retail parks or convenience centers. The latter showed a kind of “covid resistance”.
“The following years are a challenge for the retail space market, but also time to prepare new project formats, expand sales channels, and prepare the organization for the changes introduced by the pandemic. We do not see these changes as the decline of shopping centers, but their faster transformation in the area of offer, availability, or customer needs “- said Magdalena Frątczak, the head of the commercial sector at CBRE.
