Leo Tolstoy opens his famous novel Anna Karenina with the following observation: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Strip away the 19th-century Russian context, and the line just as easily speaks to retail real estate.
In this construct, high-quality grocery-anchored shopping centers are the happy families. Other retail formats, such as enclosed malls, face increasingly divergent outcomes in terms of occupancy, valuation and investment performance.
The divergence in retail real estate is driven by differences in formats and quality attributes — but especially reflects changes in consumer behavior. The key question isn’t just what happened, but why this divergence has occurred and what it reveals about performa
