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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2005
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LANDLORDS WEAVE NEW WEB SITES TO CATCH BEST TENANTS
By Dakota Smith
There was nothing so terribly revolutionary about what Edens & Avant did with its new Web site, and yet, by the standards of the retail real estate industry, it was earth-shattering.
When Edens & Avant relaunched its corporate Web site last year, it added a search page that allows retailers to browse the firm’s portfolio of properties by location, square footage and area household income. And retailers wanting to move into a shopping center with the likes of a Barnes & Noble or an Old Navy can search by tenant.
At a time when many corporate sites boast bells and whistles ranging from live webcasts to interactive chat rooms, such a search engine may seem insignificant. But the shopping center industry lags others in the adoption of new Web site features, retail development executives concede, so Edens & Avant’s home page may just be one of the most innovative in the industry.
“This is crucial information for our business,” said Copeland Kapp, corporate marketing manager at Columbia, S.C.-based Edens & Avant. Kapp says the company’s Web site traffic increases annually, though she declined to give any figures. “Our Web site is a tool for our retailers to find the right space in the right location.”
The leasing side of the business is particularly old-fashioned, with a tradition of deals based on long-standing relationships and face-to-face meetings. But retail property owners are slowly waking to the potential of Web technology, says Rusty Ferrell, president of True Matter, the Columbia, S.C.-based firm that designed the Edens & Avant site.
Much of the change is simply a reflection of a more interactive Internet era. Financial services companies, development firms and a range of other businesses are adding more interactive features to their sites, Ferrell says. “Clients want to be able to go to a Web site and do something,” he said.
Some forward-thinking retail real estate firms are creating sites with PDF (portable document format, a file format for the Adobe Acrobat reader) files of their properties, including demographic data and leasing information, earnings reports, SEC filings, press releases and the like. The publicly traded REITs are leading the charge, because their resources and investor relations needs are greater than those of private developers.
Additionally, Web sites can track who is visiting, what pages they view and how long they stay. Kapp knows that the majority of visitors to the Edens & Avant site are retailers, for instance.
Consumers are unlikely to visit the corporate Web site of a development firm, but some companies nonetheless list information targeted at shoppers. Simon Property Group, for one, promoted a gift card on its home page along with its summer-fall teen music tour, Simon DTour Live. Similarly, consumers can get information about individual malls through Taubman Centers’ Web site.
Most visits will be from retailers and investors, so developers should make sure their site is strong from both a design and branding point of view, says John Dee, president of MallFinder Network, a Denver-based marketing and design firm that works with mall developers. Most recently, MallFinder revamped the site of Craig Realty Group, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based developer.
Whether through a mission statement published on a home page or by means of 360-degree photographs of a property, developers need to differentiate themselves, says Dee.
“Take a company like Poag & McEwen,” said Dee, referring to the Memphis, Tenn.-based development firm. “They have more of a lifestyle niche, and their Web site clearly states that. Every company needs to promote the uniqueness of their properties.”
A bland Web site is worse than none at all, he says. Listing out-of-date information and images “relates a listless, moribund business presence” and signals only that a company feels obligated to have a Web site, Dee says.
Indeed, like advertisements, a corporate Web site should engage visitors. Dee points to the site of a major development firm he declined to name. “They have a huge portfolio, but online all the properties blend together,” he said. “They need to play up their gems, and they have to romance the thing up.”
Using technology that is not compatible with all Web browsers is a common pitfall whenever small developers attempt to design a site on their own, without sufficient technological knowledge, says Ferrell.
Some companies hire outside design firms, the majority of which are local, while others build their sites themselves. General Growth Properties designed its site in-house, with four marketing people and two tech people running it, according to a spokeswoman.
Outside designers can charge anywhere from about $5,000 for a bare-bones site to as much as $25,000 for a more sophisticated one, says Ferrell. After that, sites are maintained either by the client or by an outside firm.
Looking to the future, software that zooms in on aerial photos of a project will become popular over the next few years, Ferrell predicts, noting that such software is currently available through Google and Microsoft.
“A retailer, like Target, for instance, could see what highways, museums or parks are nearby,” he said.
By the same token, Kapp believes 3-D photos and renderings will become more prevalent on corporate Web sites as shopping centers increasingly shed the big-box image and get more complex architecturally.
Research can be important in deciding how to redesign a site, experts say. Before relaunching its site this past summer, Chattanooga, Tenn.-based developer CBL & Associates Properties interviewed analysts by phone and held in-house focus groups with national retailers. The old site included little information about properties, but now square footage and demographic information on each one is listed. And the expanded press section recently offered photographs of CBL’s new Chicopee Marketplace, in Springfield, Mass., so that news organizations unable to attend the opening could pull photos.
“The key thing was to make it user-friendly for multiple audiences,” said Katie Reinsmidt, director of investor relations at CBL, which hired KMT Creative, a Chattanooga-based Web design company, and Kim Mullaney, a Norfolk, Va.-based independent programmer.
Simon, the largest owner of U.S. shopping centers, is often the subject of media inquiry. To help manage press needs, the firm has a media page with attractive, downloadable images of its premier properties.
Taubman, one of the first REITS to launch a site, back in 1997, is retooling too. When completed, by the end of this year, the site will boast a more modern, clean-looking design, says Barbara Baker, Taubman’s vice president of investor relations. The firm is also “internationalizing” the site by adding such features as Chinese translations, following its opening of an office in Hong Kong in April.
“When meeting with clients [in Hong Kong], we found that they had invariably been to our site before the meeting,” said Baker. “The site was the first impression they had of our company.”
Some firms update their sites daily or weekly with new press releases or breaking news. When Hurricane Katrina hit, for example, CBL was among those that posted a site link to the Red Cross. General Growth listed emergency numbers for Louisiana-area retailers.
The more such uses landlords can find for a Web site, the harder it will be to argue that the retail real estate industry is behind the times in the Internet realm, executives observe.
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