Owners of the Felicia Shopping Center in Iasi say the obligationof shopping centre developers is to attract visitors, while tenantsare supposed to "get the money" out of their pockets.
The sales decline recorded by most retailers on the Romanian markethas given rise to a clash between shopping centre owners andtenants, with the former struggling to keep their spaces occupiedwithout losing too much of their revenues, while retailers areattempting to cut costs in order to keep their storesprofitable.
"We examined the situation to see which tenants needed help, and wedid provide support, but only if it was a win-win situation. Ourobligation is to generate traffic in the shopping centre, and theirjob is to get money out of people's pockets. Nobody forced them tosign long-term contracts. What would have happened if the salesperformance had been extraordinary? I have yet to hear about ownerssaying 'you sell too much, why don't we raise your rent during therun of the contract?'," Gijs Klomp, asset manager for Romania ofING Real Estate Investment Management (ING REIM), told ZF.
The manager of the company whose portfolio includes FeliciaShopping Center in Iasi, bought for around 40 million euros in2007, says the number of visitors to the project this year willremain close to the 2008 level, at around 5 million people for theentire year, i.e. around 13,500 daily visitors.
"We have four empty stores out of a total of 87. We have haddepartures, of course, but we managed to find replacements quickly.We even had to turn certain retailers down, sports equipmentretailers for instance, to prevent them from eating into the salesof tenants already active on that segment. I think the number ofvisitors is satisfactory for a city the size of Iasi, which alsosaw the opening of the ERA project a year ago and the expansion ofIulius Mall," added the ING REIM representative.
The Felicia shopping centre consists of a Carrefour hypermarket,owned by the French retailer, and a shopping gallery with a grosslettable area of around 11,000 square metres, whose tenants includecompanies such as Marks & Spencer, Media Galaxy, Orsay,Sephora, Intersport and Leonardo.
The Dutch company is one of the biggest players on the world's realestate market, with an investment, development and fundingportfolio of over 100 billion euros in Europe, Australia, Asia andNorth America.
However, the company has only one property on the Romanian market,although it has been present on the market for more than twoyears.
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