The real estate sector is busy repositioning portfolios, pivoting into new sectors and investing in proptech. But will it be enough to meet the elevated demands of retail real estate in the post-pandemic world?
Developing financially successful retail centres is a challenging task anywhere in the world. Investors and managers involved in retail assets must be strategic planners who can successfully embrace a number of disparate factors including demographics as well as cultural and economic circumstances.
To be successful, you need to engage your shoppers with the right product and create a tenant mix that suits geographic and regional trends. As consumers continue to buy more online, indoor attractions such as amusement park experiences and themed restaurants are almost as important to attracting footfall as fashion outlets.
If you think of a shopping centre as an ecosystem, it needs full financial, maintenance and leasing information to be meaningful and easily accessible. Large shopping centres mean operators must be able to handle large tenant counts. For example, due to the sheer size of the shopping area, instinct and walkthroughs are not enough for detecting inefficiencies and troubled tenants. This is where you need to utilise reliable data and metrics.
Data and data analysis are important parts in retail real estate and having transparency into your data is imperative for pushing your business further. Utilising singular proptech solutions across every aspect of your real estate portfolio can help improve efficiency and make life easier for tenants.
Technology platforms that offer end-to-end solutions from the lowest transactional level through to a fund or investor level, help reduce risk, increase scalability and provide ease of use for both internal and external organisations.
Single Source of Truth
With the retail sector generating more data in a single month than other real estate markets do in a year, having disparate systems can cause a lot of inconsistencies and increase costs, resources and risk. Investing in one connected solution will lower your total cost of ownership over technology, balance risk and increase revenue thanks to actionable insights.
Your investors expect strong returns for their money and being able to store, maintain, manage and utilise retail property data is imperative going forward. These operations are as important as inventory, location and demographics in determining the success of a retail centre. As a result, retail owners and operators are turning to cloud-based systems, such as Yardi Voyager, that are designed to manage vast amounts of business-wide data.
These solutions help companies manage all property and financial operations, as well as measure performance and process invoices, all from a single connected solution. This single source of truth removes the need for disparate systems and incorporates all your necessary data in one location for data clarity and better insights, real-time analytics and mitigates risk.
Solutions such as Yardi Voyager help generate business intelligence that unifies property and accounting information to give property managers and investors crucial analysis on retail spaces.
Whether you’re a Middle Eastern mega-mall, European high street or a rural outlet in the United States, traditional shops and shopping are here to stay for the foreseeable future in spite of the pandemic, e-commerce competition or economic slumps.
In order to thrive, retailers and investors need to collaborate and adopt new ways of engaging consumers, all while delivering services that enhance relationships, reduce costs and increase value – and data is at the heart of it all.
Retail Real Estate runs on Yardi
With Yardi’s Retail Suite, you can optimise all aspects of your retail centre management. See how the award-winning technology can enhance your operations through a connected solution.