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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2003
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BEWARE OF OVERBUILDING, MIDEAST MEETING TOLD
BY DEBRA HAZEL
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Shopping center development has increased exponentially in the Middle East, raising the specter of overdevelopment in some places, said speakers at the Middle East Council of Shopping Centres’ ninth annual Shopping Centre Convention Conference & Exhibition, held here Oct. 6-9.
Retail space in the Persian Gulf region may be growing faster than the market can handle, they said.
“While worldwide shopping center development is declining, in this region we see quite the reverse,” said Simon Thomson, principal of Retail International, a London-based consulting firm. “Over the past 25 to 30 years, it has increased quite alarmingly.”
The Gulf’s first enclosed mall, Al Ghurair Center, opened in Dubai in 1980. The second, Dubai’s Wafi Center, was not built until 1991. Today, however, enclosed malls have sprung up all over the Middle East — from the Al Mamlaka mixed-use center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (see story), to The Plaza Mall, opened this past August in Ramallah, in the economically and politically ravaged West Bank.
By 2006 the region will have 70 million square feet (6.5 million square meters) of shopping centers, and that will grow to 76.4 million square feet by 2008, Thomson said.
Among the projects set to go up in the Middle East over the next few years are The Nile Plaza, to open shortly in Cairo, Egypt; The Stars Centre, with 1.7 million square feet of retail, to open in Cairo in March; expansions of both The Abu Dhabi Mall and The Marina Mall, Abu Dhabi, slated for completion over the next two years; Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates (being planned as the largest mall in the area, this is to include an indoor ski slope and the world’s tallest tower, though its opening date has not been determined); and the new Serafi Megamall, Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which was announced at the meeting.
The Middle East has made the transition from ancient souks to enclosed super-regional malls in less than a generation, said Phil McArthur, CSM, director of leasing and marketing for yet another project to be built, Dubai Festival City Center. “But overbuilding is now prevalent,” he said. “Catchment areas are shrinking and so are customer numbers.”
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