Fears of a slowdown in European retail are vastly exaggerated, as the situation on the Continent is much healthier than in the US, experts agree.
‘Everyone is tarring all retail with the same brush and shorting the sector for no good reason,’ said William Kistler, executive vice president and managing director, EMEA ICSC, at the PropertyEU European Retail Investment briefing at EXPO REAL on Wednesday. ‘It is a contagion effect coming from the US, but there there is 3 to 5 times more retail per capita than in Europe.’
While the US is oversupplied, Europe ‘is outperforming most markets globally,’ he pointed out. Spain and Italy have led the way in opening new shopping centres but there is still a strong pipeline of 4.5 m2 in the rest of Europe.
The high street is also performing well because of millennials’s urban lifestyle, which leads them to live and shop in city centres. Add to that a recovering economy and lower unemployment and the picture looks even rosier.
‘We have a much healthier situation in Europe than the US and we can see that reflected in the figures,’ said Florencio Beccar, director of retail investment Europe, CBRE Global Investors.
