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Blackstone Group’s mall developer arm, Nexus Malls, said footfalls are significantly up after it rebranded and refurbished a few of the facilities.
The company, which had acquired various single owner properties had renovated it to meet the growing demand of retail real estate. Besides this it is also experimenting with AR technology to introduce Nexus Grab, a discount coupon app. Users will be encouraged to find discount much like finding the popular little creatures in Pokemon Go.
Nexus currently has a portfolio of eight malls with an estimated area of 5.98 million sq ft.
“We have been seeing a 14 per cent growth in sales and about 12 per cent increase in footfall at our rebranded malls,” Nishank Joshi, CMO, Nexus Mall told BusinessLine . He said the malls were rebranded to improve visibility and also bring in financial revenues.
Without divulging any financial numbers, Joshi said the exercise of refurbishing has been a excruciating effort.
“In our Amritsar mall, we took the food court from one side to the other. We also work closely with retailers to work around relevant themes such as festivals,” he said.
Technology investmentsNexus Malls was set up in June 2016 to own and manage shopping malls in the country. Typically, Blackstone buys out malls, which are then owned and run by Nexus.
It has so far bought three other operational malls — Ahmedabad One (earlier known as AlphaOne Ahmedabad) and Mall of Amritsar (earlier AlphaOne Amritsar) from realty firm Alpha Corp, and a 50 per cent stake in Westend Mall in Pune.
Nexus has properties in Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Mumbai, Pune and Indore among other cities.
Joshi said the company has invested in technology and is even experimenting with augmented reality (AR).
“We have introduced Nexus Grab, an AR program, which takes the video feed from your phone’s camera and location. Once the application detects the user at the mall, it will use the phone camera and superimpose virtual images on to it. The user needs to catch these objects through their phone and for every object that they catch, the application throws up a discount, which is stored at the backend,” he said.
He said a typical user can catch up to five discount coupons and can be redeemed within 48 hours of finding them.
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