Retail Property Markets

Abstract

Thanks to its relatively high purchasing power combined with nearly 81 million inhabitants Germany is the biggest retail market in Europe. Since the 1990s the dynamics of total sales were low; nevertheless the retail sales area continued to grow. Amid tough competition professional retailers and retail developments not least grew on new and modern sales space. But new planning law for large-scale retailing becomes more and more a bottleneck as planners nowadays often favor inner cities and other existing functioning retail locations. Since the pipeline for prime locations and leasable and investable objects is narrow, rents and property prices for these scarce projects are rising by trend whereas low-quality locations and objects show a more difficult performance. Focusing retail expansion on good micro-locations in well-established shopping cities makes even more sense today due to the significantly rising importance of e-commerce.