Bloomberg/ Lauren Coleman-Lochner & Eliza Ronalds-Hannon/06-09-17
As if malls didn’t have enough problems, count one more: retailers looking to slash the duration of their leases.
After more than a dozen bankruptcies this year contributed to thousands of store closures, visibility for the industry is so poor that retailers are pushing for lease renewals as short as a year or two — down from five to 10 years.
…Somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 stores will close in the U.S. this year, said Garrick Brown, vice president of Americas retail research for commercial broker Cushman & Wakefield — more than twice as many as the 4,000 last year. He sees this figure rising to about 13,000 next year.
PG View: And yet we continue to add retail square footage, because money remains cheap. This is not going to end well.
