A Game Plan for Retail Shopping Center Tenant Prospecting

Finding the right retail tenants to lease shops within your shopping centre can be quite a special process.  It is a matter of finding the right tenant for the location and the tenancy mix.  Every shop is different; every shopping centre is unique.  Your prospecting model for finding new tenants should be carefully crafted.

When you make the right leasing decisions, everyone benefits.  The landlord, customers, and the other tenants all see benefits in the choices that you make in finding the best tenant for the property and the shop.

So how do you get this started?

Site assessment is really important as the first part of planning the tenant sourcing process.  When you find the right tenant(s) and place them successfully into the property, the benefits are many given the factors of customer attraction that occur from a good tenant placement.

When you build and strengthen customer visits, you boost sales.  When you keep a customer in a property for a longer period, you boost sales.  Everything has a retail customer focus first and foremost.

Develop a leasing strategy and a plan of attack to find the best tenants for your vacancy.  Here are some variables to help with starting that assessment process:

1. Tenant types – Understand the type(s) of tenant that you need for the vacancy. Look at the greater tenant mix as part of that process.  Who are your strong and weak tenants and why is that so?  Where are those tenants located in the property? Can you choose a strong merchandise type that will suit your vacancy?
2. Customer surveys – Regularly connect with your customers so you can understand why they come to your shopping centre and when they do that. Are they coming to your property for shopping needs and or ‘pleasure’?   A bit of ‘retail pleasure’ will always add to the customer interest.  Perhaps you can add a tenant type that is more of a ‘destination’ for customers and will help pull in more customers from your local demographic.
3. The Retail Competition – It always pays to know what your shopping center competition is doing when it comes to rents, vacancies, and customers. Keep a close eye on your retail competition and determine what strengths and weaknesses may exist in their property that can have an influence on what you do from a retail sense.

When you know the local factors that will have an impact on your retail property, you can make the right leasing choices.  That’s how things work in retail shopping centre management and leasing.