Shopping Centers Today

JUN 2017

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

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30 S C T / J U N E 2 0 1 7 stores this summer. "Now it's the small-box stores that are hot," Livingston said. The latest entry to the Whole Foods 365 chain, the upscale grocer's affordable-stores division that made its debut a year ago in Los Angeles, is a 30,000-square-foot store in Cedar Park, Texas, just north of Austin, which opened in April. Urban-format grocers, such as the planned 10,700-square-foot Trader Joe's intended for the Downtown East neighborhood of Minneapolis in 2018, skew even smaller, says John Lambert, who heads JLL's national retail real estate development arm. Increasingly, grocers are using pinpoint de- mographics research to identify optimal sites, few of which, it turns out, are in suburban greenfield locations, he says. "For a grocer, it's much easier to shoehorn into a 10,000-to-18,000-square-foot space than to build 50,000 square feet." The gro- cery sector continues to be a top priority for in- vestors, developers and urban planners, Lambert says. "In fact, when we talk about almost any kind of development these days, there's usually some kind of grocery format going in," he said. Walmart is paring its store growth this year "and seems to have been stopped dead," according to Livingston. And new independent grocery stores are growing even scarcer, he says. "They are getting hit by chains that are stepping up their price reductions as well as their online shopping systems." The modest 15.2 million square feet of U.S. completions in the first quarter of this year (most new retail gets built in the second half of the year) comprised 8.7 million square feet of general re- tail, 3.6 million square feet of nonmall shopping centers, 1.9 million square feet of mall space and 1 million square feet of power centers, according to CoStar Group and JLL. NOW THE SMALL-BOX STORES ARE HOT

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