Executive Summary

The Coresight Research team is attending the ICSC RECon convention, which is taking place in Las Vegas May 20–23. Here, we feature some takeaways from our conversations with the retail real estate executives in attendance.

• Experiential retail and the reinvention of shopping centers are the dominant topics of conversation.
• Many shopping centers are dedicating more space to food-service offerings, but that share of space has a natural cap. A popular view among attendees is that food service has an upper limit in the high teens in terms of percentage of mall square footage that can be practically devoted to it.
• The mall experience is not just about food service, though. Malls’ diversification beyond retail involves a mix of leisure and entertainment venues, gaming and virtual-reality concepts, art installations, business services, and other nonretail uses.
• Some shopping-center landlords we talked to are feeling more positive about store closures. The strongest landlords view closures as an opportunity to rebalance their tenant mix and improve their offerings.