This week, the blog will not be about lease administration. Rather, it is just a few pictures to give you confidence going in to the upcoming holiday retail season.
My wife and I are visiting our son in Puebla, Mexico this week. We happened to arrive during Buen Fin – the Mexican version of Black Friday. Traffic around the city is ridiculous and is attributed to Buen Fin. And, traffic in the malls, shopping center and streets is absolutely unbelievable. While there is nothing scientific about it, I am still a fan of “bag checks.” No. Not the bag checks going in to a concert or sporting event, but the visual bag check of whether or not people were buying. And, yes! They were buying.
For me, these pictures are better than any motivational posters.
(Just a couple of quick observations. If you look at the pictures, you will see that the anchors do not have grand courts. They are flush with the rest of the inlines, and they may online have a 50-60’ front lease line. Instead of having wall kiosks, flush with the front of the anchors, you then have a series of smaller premises (maybe 750-1,000 sf), making it much busier (in a good way) than our US anchor courts. Also, with Puebla being in a much more temperate climate, they had a good portion of the mall covered, but open air (you should see it in some of the pictures), eliminating the expense of mall HVAC in the part of the mall. And, finally, I have never see a food court busier. In the picture, you will notice shoppers sitting and finding space wherever they could, often on the floors and half walls. My son said that the quality of the local food court tenants is exceptional.)