do you think retail will be the same? or do you think they;ll change is to osmething else?
Absolutely things will change. There was already a structural shift away from traditional shopping malls prior to Covid and this just poured gasoline on an open fire. Wouldn’t be going anywhere close to retail focused REIT’s right now… they’ve already taken a bath and I don’t think the full extent has been realized yet. A lot of the smaller malls will be forced to close up shop the longer this drags. Tenants not paying rent or receiving relief combined with high overhead costs for the owners creates a perfect storm.
About the only time I go to a shopping mall is to buy clothes and/or suits. And now even the suit business is being disrupted by Indochino (although I’m not a fan of their product). Add in the threat you might catch a cold and die if you do visit a mall, and that’s a hard No for me.
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Clearly a bunch are going to go under as Voyager3 said, basically what was already playing out. On the longer haul, I think it quickly stabilizes and goes back to normal. People, especially young people have a need to go out.
I’m surprised there isn’t more convo about the fact that there are at least three major vaccines that just launched human trials with initial study results due in late May. Pfizer saying if it is successful they could have it in production by October with more than 20M doses by year end for high risk areas and 200M the next year.
what are they converting to? which reit names have been doing conversion in recent years? im curious to see how they did it.
In my experience most of them are converted into eye sores.
a couple of older malls near me were converted into offices/call centers/gyms/a satellite campus for a technical college. One happened decades ago, but the other one was largely triggered by two newer larger malls nearby undergoing massive expansions and renovations which led to fewer people going to the older mall
ahhhh ic. so just more commercials. i wonder with all this work from home, if they just convert these places to more residential eventually. whats the $ rent per sq feet. are residnetials typically lower than office or retail places.
The residential thing is interesting, but I’m guessing the cost to convert is far higher than the cost of most new builds in this day and age. They’ve gotten the cost of constructing a faux luxury cheap fab condo development down pretty low. Also most malls aren’t well located from a residential POV and have really skewed usage of square footage, odd layouts for that purpose and waaay to much parking. It just doesn’t seem economic, which is why I think most of them sit.
Best bet for old malls is community colleges.
No money for REITs in community college. This is when actual analysis comes in handy. If you could identify a high quality REIT with limited exposure to sub par retail there might be a few bargains out there. Losses have to be mounting for the smaller ones… hard to see it ending well.
there might arguably be money for someone
Many years ago, I sat next to a lady on a plane who worked for a company which built dorms for universities. The deal was something like they got the income until the dorm was paid for and then the dorm reverted to the university.
Maybe there’s a play converting an old mall to a community college and then rent-to-buy as it were
I agree with BS about the odd layout. People tend to like windows in their apartments and at least some malls are big and square meaning the interiors are too far from the outside walls. They’re good for converting into big rooms, like gyms or call centers or movie theaters or lecture theaters, not so good for converting into apartments