The rise of e-commerce is an ongoing story for the retail sector. But the adoption of online retailing has been uneven across markets — meaning some cities are closer to achieving a new equilibrium than others. New research from MetLife Investment Management has examined the pace of e-commerce adoption — and which markets maybe the best bet for brick-and-mortar retail.

In A New Dawn in Retail, MetLife Investment Management compared e-commerce penetration rates with retail real estate performance — and found a clear correlation, as markets with higher e-commerce scores had poorer retail real estate performance over the past five years.

“We used a number of alternative datasets in conducting this research,” said Will Pattison, Head of Real Estate Research and Strategy at MetLife Investment Management. “When we ran the first correlation, there were a lot of results that did not make sense until more of the picture came into focus. For example, we coul