Shopping Centers Today

MAY 2012

Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

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ISTINYEPARK, ISTANBUL, INCOPORATES A HYBRID FORMAT. Thomas Consultants, who has worked extensively in Turkey. "Some of these new projects are almost as precedent-set- ting as the Grand Bazaar, because they take the industry to new thresholds." Among these is Istanbul's 1.4 mil- lion-square-foot (about 130,000 square meters) Marmara Forum mall, which opened last spring and was named a finalist in ICSC's European Shopping Center Awards, in the Very Large Shop- ping Center category. Marmara, which opened about 95 percent occupied, contains waterfalls, terraces and even a TV studio. The mall boasts 350 na- tional and international brands and is the newest in a lengthening line of in- novative retail projects created by Neth- erlands-based Multi Corp. Like other outside developers and retailers entering Turkey, Multi Corp. sought out a local partner — Turkmall in this case — before starting to craft its portfolio of centers, under the Forum name, about five years ago. This includes the 500,000-square-meter Forum Istan- 208 SCT / MAY 2012 bul, the largest center in Europe, which opened in late 2009 with an Ikea anchor and entertainment components Jurassic Land, the Magic Ice Museum and the Turkazoo Aquarium. Multi now has 10 malls under the Forum flag in Turkey, plus six more in development. Istanbul's high-end Istinye Park hy- brid mall, which many developers and retailers consider the gold standard for future expansion in the country, attracts some 18 million shoppers a year and is fully occupied (see story on page 210). All told, 24 shopping centers opened in Istanbul in 2010 and 2011, adding about 800,000 square meters of gross leasable area to the city's retail stock. Some 30 more centers are in the pipe- line. At the end of 2011, total GLA in Turkey reached 7.6 million square me- ters across 302 shopping centers. "Turkey has probably been the best- kept secret in the Western world," said Jim Dion, an international retail consul- tant who works with Turkish consumer- electronics giant Vestel. "The Turks are industrious and have come up with amazingly creative ways to sell and buy things. It goes very deep in their DNA." With Greece, Iran and Syria as neighbors, Turkey is "an island of sta- bility in a sea of uncertainty," said de- veloper and Turkish native Yaromir Steiner, CEO of U.S.-based Steiner + Associates, which has been active in the country. "There is no crisis there." The numerous mall projects, which are spreading to Ankara and Izmir, and to such secondary cities as Antalya and Ad- ana, are a response to pent-up demand, he says. The political and economic sta- bility of Turkey over the past 10 years has helped extricate the country from old perceptions, according to a report by Jones Lang LaSalle Retail. Heartened by a young and upwardly mobile popu- lation, relatively untapped markets and generally encouraging fiscal prospects, retail investment is soaring in Turkey, the firm says. Annual foreign invest- ment flows have risen from €700 mil- lion (about $900 million) annually in

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