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Developers of retail real estate operating in the regions have awakened and begun coming back to their suspended projects.  Retailers take interest but are cautious in how they select projects and for now they are not ready to open more than one-two shops in the cities with population below half a million.

Out of 280 shopping centers in Moscow, only 78 meet all the requirements of a modern shopping center. Considering the shortage of quality areas and no new facilities being commissioned in the capital city, the owners of non-modern shopping centers will be forced to redevelop their commercial facilities, or at least create new concepts for them. The main criteria for success of shopping centers today consist not only in their owner’s competent marketing policy, but also in a clear concept, strong positioning, as well as accountability and responsibility to the tenants of the SC.

The right site - is nothing more than the virtual agent of a commercial center, the affective informational perspective of its unique brand. The major marketing objective of a specific shopping and recreation complex is to represent the widest possible spectrum of its information in a most attractive and user friendly environment.

The spectre of rapid market saturation has forced proprietors of Russian shopping centers to rethink methods for holding onto tenants. Experts habitually appeal to Western experience, – giants of the American trade have always had an arsenal of programs for forming customer loyalty. Although the idea that customer loyalty raises a shopping center’s capital seems a lot like an invention of marketing experts to us, in the future, with the saturation of trading projects, centers that have managed to attract customer loyalty will clearly be the ones keeping their tenants as well.

Under the present conditions of intense competition between retail centers, neglecting the unique new methods of attracting visitors is at least strange – especially considering the fact that the market is seeing the rise of better and better quality properties. It is not practical or possible to bring in tenants with free champagne or galas with pop stars. But working out and implementing entirely new methods of attracting clients must not be worth it either – at any moment they could prove disloyal and slink off to other landlords promising bonuses and creative deals.