Characteristics of Successful Shopping Centres: a combination of spatial and non-spatial factors

During the last century the retail sector underwent major transformations. One major contributor to this transformation process was the establishment of (planned) shopping centres. The aim of this paper is to control for what factors that influence the sales level for city centre shopping malls, externally located and residential area centres and finally at the aggregate level of all shopping centres. The dataset includes all Swedish shopping centres and is assessed through a cross-section study for the year of 2005. The study is unique both in regards to the data set used and that the study is done from a European perspective. Earlier studies looking at centre sales have been looking at the North American market. Explanatory variables consist of both shopping centre specific data in addition to characteristics of the surrounding region. The results show that the most important factors for explaining high performing shopping centres is  a desirable tenant mix and the prevalence of internal and external agglomeration economies such as market and centre size. Competition level, a higher level of regional purchasing power, centre age and an enclosed building are other factors which can influence the performance rate depending on group of retail centres studied.