More billion-dollar hauls at major malls

Now controlled completely by GPT after a sell-out by the Besen family, Highpoint is the fifth of Australia’s major shopping centres to crack the $1 billion mark in annual sales.

The biggest of them all is Chadstone, in Melbourne’s east and jointly-owned by billionaire John Gandel family and Vicinity Centres. It was the first centre to pull in $1 billion, ten years ago.

Now it is collecting $1.94 billion.

The annual Shopping Centre News Big Gun Rankings paint a picture of rude health among the major malls. There are 96 in this year’s assay, all of them with 50,000 square metres or more of floor space.

Biggest may not necessarily be best. An arguably better metric to measure the performance of a mall is by its turnover per square metre.

Once again, Mirvac’s Broadway shopping centre on the edge of the Sydney CBD has taken the gong, generating trade at a massive $14,545 for every square metre of retail space.

But perhaps the metric that will be most closely watched is turnover for specialty shops, as malls owners battle the spectre of online retail and softer sentiment more broadly.

Scentre Group’s Westfield Sydney came out on top, booking an average specialty moving annual turnover (MAT) per sq m of $22,194. That result comes as Scentre reported improving specialty sales figures as the year wore on last year.

In simple terms, that means a 50 sq m shop in Westfield Sydney, trading at the average level for the centre, would have an annual turnover of $1.1 million.

Scentre also went home with other top gongs, with Westfield centres scooping up eight rankings out of the top 10 best big-gun centres by MAT.

Competition with online shopping and “disruption” continues to weigh heavily on the shoulders of landlords, with many looking to their core staple, good customer service as defence against new shopping guns like Amazon.

“Digital has created a world of instant gratification, the new consumer wants immediacy … today it is more important that we understand these consumers,” GPT head of retail Vanessa Orth said at the Big Gun rankings lunch in Sydney on Thursday.

“This is where data becomes extremely valuable. We have to curate our places with the right products, the right experiences, and the right activation with the right markets. Content needs to be customised to the different segments.”

For Woolworths’ director of property, Ralph Kemmler, focusing back on the customers was key to preserving the bricks and mortar business.

“We lost focus on our customers but what we have done in the last little while is to listen to our customers,” he said.