The Hindu Business Line : `Real estate developers, retailers must work in tandem'

According to Mr B.S. Nagesh, Managing Director, Shopper's Stop, stakeholders in the retail industry - retailers, real estate developers, financiers and the Government must work towards customer accountability.

Speaking at "Estate South 2006", a real estate industry seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), he said all stakeholders today worked for their own benefit, fail to channelise their efforts at customer satisfaction. Real estate developers do not position themselves as retail developers, he said. "Positioning a construction as `retail' cannot be done after the planning and design stage," he said. Planning issues like availability of tenants, car parking space, retail area and access to the mall for transporting goods were critical to the retail experience.

Projects get delayed because developers overlook such things and end up reworking built up portions of the project. He said developers should look into these aspects before the project design phase. Mr Fazle A. Naqvi, Executive Director, Landmark International, said developers must look at meaningful differentiators to position their malls. There is high commonality among malls, especially with regard to housing premium and international brands. "In the process of housing such brands, malls should not lose their identity," he said.

He cited examples of specialist malls such as Eva Mall in Bangalore that catered to women, Sim Lim Towers (for electronics products) and Funan Digitalife Mall (for information technology hardware), in Singapore. "Developers must choose brands that would make sense to the customer and not blindly rent space to every premium and international brand," he said.

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