BEAUTIFUL SCENERY, BURGEONING MALL SCENE

Three years ago Panama City, Panama, had no modern mall. Today it boasts three, with a fourth under development in the suburb of Tocumen, near the airport. Probably no other urban center in the Western Hemisphere can count as many construction cranes along its skyline as Panama City. Most of the new projects are condominiums between 40 and 60 stories high.

As for the malls, the most successful has been Multiplaza Pacific, a project of the El Salvador-based Grupo Roble, the largest shopping center developer in Central America, with 19 centers totaling about 5 million square feet. Grupo Roble is also the builder of the mall near the airport. “Multiplaza has been doing great,” said Roberto Fasquelle, Grupo Roble’s general manager for Panama. “The daily visitor count averages 22,000, and the project is only a little more than 500,000 square feet. We have 190 tenants, nine of which are anchors, and 29 different food operations.”

The mall, which mainly faces the exterior, also houses a supermarket and a smaller version of Home Depot called the Do It Center. There is a Marriott Courtyard hotel on the site too. “We are 100 percent occupied,” said Fasquelle, “and rents at around $30 to $35 per square meter for space below 200 square meters is higher than anywhere else.”

Grupo Roble is adding 130,000 square feet, all of which is to be high-end — Armani, Cartier and Fendi are but some of the tenants.

The other successful retail development, Albrook Mall, was constructed in an area that was once part of a U.S. military installation guarding the Panama Canal. In contrast to the more posh Multiplaza, this mall contains discounters. “It is a completely different mix than the Multiplaza Pacific,” said Carla Lopez Abello, a Panama City-based director with CB Richard Ellis.

Locally based Grupo Los Pueblos obtained a concession from the government to build a bus terminal, but it also acquired the surrounding land, and there it built the mall. Originally measuring 800,000 square feet, Albrook Mall now exceeds 1 million square feet. The older space included a Super99 supermarket; the newer space added a Benetton and a Zara.

The third center is Multicentro Mall. A Colombian investor group built the 325,000-square-foot Multicentro, bringing in a lot of Colombian retailers with no connection to the local market, says Fasquelle. Further, the mall was originally built condo-style, with individual stores sold, which helped fund development but gave management less control over the space. “The presence of many foreign stores unknown to most Panamanians made Multicentro a bit too ‘exclusive’ for local tastes,” noted a local newspaper. Even so, Multicentro is finding its way, says Ramon Roux, director general of CB Richard Ellis in Panama. The mall is part of a complex in which a Radisson hotel and a casino have been built. And Conway, a popular department store, will soon open a branch at Multicentro.

— Steve Bergsman