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MED CENTERS GIVE LATIN AMERICAN MALLS SHOT IN THE ARM

By María Bird Picó

Medical offices are doing a good job of keeping malls healthy in Latin America.

Some 150,000 people a year visit the medical center at Barra Shopping, a regional mall in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The nine-year-old Integramédica clinic at Alto Las Condes, a mall in Santiago, Chile, receives 1,300 patients a day Monday through Saturday. Jockey Plaza Shopping Center, an 80,000-square-meter (861,000-square-foot) enclosed mall in Lima, Peru, is about to break ground on a seven-story, 43,000-square-foot medical building that will house 67 doctor’s offices. Some 60 miles south of that capital city, meanwhile, Sur Plaza Boulevard, a shopping center in the beach resort town of Asia, is opening a medical center this year, the fruit of a partnership with Clínica San Pablo, a major health care provider, says Sur Plaza Boulevard general manager Ramón Molla. The clinic will even have a helicopter landing pad. And Centro Comercial Buenaventura, an enclosed mall on the outskirts of Caracas, Venezuela, contains Clínica Médica Buenaventura, which boasts an operating room for ambulatory surgeries, some medical laboratories, X-ray facilities and an emergency room.

Yes, medical centers are great for malls — and they are so for lots of reasons, retail executives say.

“In Latin America, shopping centers are medical doctors’ big waiting rooms,” said Juan José Calle, general manager of Jockey Plaza and president of Asociación de Centros Comerciales y de Entretenimiento del Perú. And those patients, even with appointments, often have to wait a long time, because doctor’s offices in Latin America are notoriously bad about keeping to schedule. “A medical visit is therefore a perfect complement to a mall,” Calle said.

Even better, in Latin America patients rarely go to the doctor alone. “In our countries people go to their medical appointments accompanied by relatives and/or friends,” Calle said. Of those 150,000 who visit the medical center at Barra Shopping each year, for instance, only about 50,000 are actual patients, says Reginald Barnes, director of corporate relations at Brazil-based Grupo Multiplan, which owns and operates Barra and 10 others, and manages a further five malls for other owners.

At Parque Arauco, a mall in Santiago, 3 percent of the 2 million monthly visitors are patients and their relatives — about 60,000 potential shoppers, says Gonzalo Quinteros, manager of shopping centers at Compañía Parque Arauco, which owns Parque Arauco and other shopping centers.

At many malls patients sign in upon arrival at a medical center and receive an appointment for later. They then go into the mall to eat, pay utilities and shop. A magnetic-resonance-imaging center in the Montehiedra Town Center mall in San Juan, Puerto Rico, lends patients a beeper, or patients can monitor the waiting list from their cell phones, as they can at two other shopping centers on the island, Plaza Las Américas and Plaza Carolina.

Another bonus for malls is that medical centers attract shoppers during off-peak hours, executives say. “Medical offices generate traffic during the early hours, a time that is practically dead at malls,” said Arnold Moreno, president of Cámara Venezolana de Centros Comerciales, Comerciantes y Afines (Cavececo). Moreno is also president of his family-owned development firm, Mantex. “It also pushes up sales at the food court and at health-related retailers such as drugstores.”

Moreno visited Santiago in 1997 to study how Alto Las Condes and Parque Arauco incorporated medical facilities. He came back with plans to put health care facilities into the three malls Mantex operates in Venezuela.

“We went with the medical center because the Venezuela government was talking about opening the health care system to the private sector, just like in Chile,” said Moreno. In the event, though, only one was installed at his malls; a change of government brought the decentralization plan to a halt, but Clínica Médica Buenaventura at Centro Comercial Buenaventura has managed to survive by catering to patients with cash or private medical plans, Moreno says.

For shopping centers and medical tenants to work well together, a growing private health sector and a developed mall market are needed, executives say. Countries with relatively developed mall industries, such as Brazil and Chile, or the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, have successfully incorporated medical offices into their malls. This has not yet happened in other countries, including Argentina and Mexico, but it is about to in Colombia and Guatemala.

The Pan American Health Organization, a division of the World Health Organization, estimates that about 25 percent of the people in Latin America and the Caribbean lack access to health care. The organization estimates that 218 million of the region’s residents participate in no health system; an additional 100 million live remote from any medical facilities. But as the regional economy improves, so will the job market and hence access to private health insurance, sources say, making the mall-medical center combination even more potent.

Clearly, for many retail landlords, the climate is already conducive to bringing in medical tenants. For one thing, malls are a place where patients can accomplish several tasks at one time, which is especially important for residents of Latin America’s ever more congested cities. “The problem is not always lack of money, but lack of time,” said Barnes. “The advantage shopping centers offer is that, in one visit, you can get done what would otherwise involve between five and seven stops. In our cities each stop is a struggle for a parking spot, parking fees, gridlocks and dealing with lack of security.”

So Grupo Multiplan is signing up more medical tenants. In addition to the doctor’s offices the company has at Barra Shopping and at Nova América, also in Rio de Janeiro, the firm says it is planning to open others within the next two years at Cristal Shopping, in the city of Porto Alegre, and ParkShopping Barigüi, in Curitiba.

In Santiago the medical and retail combo at Parque Arauco was an instant hit, Quinteros says. In 1996 the mall opened 43,000 square feet for laboratory space, and later added 43,000 more to accommodate an operating room for plastic surgery. The medical center now stands 13 stories tall. Whereas 8,000 patients visited the clinic every month nine years ago, today the number is 27,000. That helped generate an estimated $512 million in sales last year for the center.

Chile was the first country in the region to start decentralizing its health system, in the early 1980s, and Chile now has six malls with medical centers. But Parque Arauco’s parent firm is postponing the extension of this medical office model to Argentina, where it has a 30 percent ownership stake in Alto Palermo S.A., a major shopping center landlord. The private health care market is still too small there, Quinteros says.

And it is not just private health care that needs to grow in the region. Peru’s Calle says he believes that the mall industry in most of Latin America must first solidify its position and sustain retail traffic before wooing nontraditional tenants.

Colombia is precisely at that stage. Jardin Plaza Shopping, which opened in November in Cali, has designed a six-story medical building but will wait at least two years to break ground, says general manager Sandra Tenorio. “Our focus right now is the mall.” Colombia’s private health system is not as developed as Chile’s, Tenorio says, but a growing number of Colombians with financial resources are going private.

And that is happening elsewhere in the region too. All of which bodes well for Latin America’s shopping center industry.