Before long in your search for the best location for your business you’ll ask yourself "Why don’t I locate in a shopping centre?" After all, they provide a tremendous number of potential customers, attracted by a concentration of retailing rarely found in strip locations. Car parking is provided as is marketing support and other customer facilities like toilets and child care.

When considering a shopping centre it is important to assess its strength relative to its catchment area. Does the centre dominate the catchment or does the number of vacant shops indicate that trade is leaking away? Remember shopping centre developers locate centres in poor locations as well as excellent ones. You want to ensure that you don’t open your store in a secondary centre only to have to compete with a bigger, better one down the road.

Having analysed the catchment area’s demographics and spending patterns and satisfied yourself that there is sufficient demand in the market to support your store, look very carefully at the characteristics of your potential shopping centre location. When you approach the centre by car what is seen first - is there good signage to the centre? How about 1km away – are there any signs to the centre directing traffic your way? When people approach the centre, which is the most prominent wing? Is the centre so big that there are several shopping zones? Make sure that you are in the right zone. What obstacles are there to the centres visibility? Does the developer intend to build on any out parcels and so obscure the centre itself?

Before you commit to a lease, you will need definite answers to questions such as:

• Can I live with the centre’s hours of operation?
• How can I expand?
• Can I have right of first refusal on other prime sites?
• How much do I have to contribute to Centre marketing?
• Is the style of centre management flexible?

Make sure that the deal you get isn’t simply because the centre has found it hard to let the particular unit. The quality of tenants may be less than you would hope for and you do not want to be used as a filler. Remember the centre will restrict your signage, so ensure that you can create a sign which is as prominent as possible within the centres rules. Also ensure that you can use window space effectively and people can see into the store.

Within the centre it is essential to analyse the pattern of pedestrian movement to and from the car parks but also from key retailing areas. If your business offers a service - eg hair dresser, travel agent - rather than products, you may be able to select a location away from the main flows but even so you must have clear directional visible signage. Graph the number of pedestrians passing by key locations in the centre and see if the centre management has managed to evenly distribute the potential customers to all areas and levels.

The architectural design of many shopping centres emphasize the entrances of the anchor department stores, rather than the entrance to the general mall area. For a retailer the latter is the better option.

Avoid:

• Recessed frontages
• Dead end corridors
• Areas out of the main stream – ends of wings or near secondary entrances
• Kiosks and furniture directly outside your store

Find:

• Protruding frontages
• Locations near to anchor stores, which are not recessed
• High traffic areas
• Complimentary businesses
• Units which can take stock deliveries easily.

Your key objectives in choosing your location are to achieve low rents, excellent parking, maximum visibility, high traffic, sustainable costs and, of course the highest possible sales. Locating in centre your operation will be affected by:

• Higher rents – possibly based on sales levels
• Common maintenance charges
• Shorter lease terms and high depreciation
• Restrictions imposed by Centre management

As a centre tenant your wellbeing is directly linked to the effectiveness of the centre as a whole. Even if you are a destination shop or part of a well known franchise, your store's pulling power will depend on traffic generated by the centre itself.

Before meeting with centre management or the lessor you need to obtain some vital information – tenant mix, pedestrian traffic, catchment demographics and spend – on your own. Start by checking the presence and absence of key competitors, both direct and indirect. Check that the proportions of each trading activity in the centre match those of similar centres. In some cases centres under financial strain may fill space with retailers selling the same or similar merchandise. You need to find out the best retail mix for your type of business and use this as a benchmark.

It is often easier to operate in a centre because of fixed hours, relatively steady business trends through the day, and more predictability from season to season. But remember that your business can easily be lost amongst the other businesses.