Dubai to cut shopping malls down to size - FT.com

For many, they are the symbol of Dubai, a destination of tour buses, celebrated in the emirate’s promotional literature and visited by millions each year. But now developers in the emirate say it may be time to move away from fabled mega-malls and concentrate instead on building smaller-scale retail centres.

In recent years developers such as Majid al-Futtaim and Emaar have opened centres such as Mall of the Emirates (“Shopping is just the beginning”) and Dubai Mall (“Everything you desire”), to the point where the malls compete to attract footfall. Developers have used anything from aquariums to ski slopes to attract shoppers to the emirate’s estimated 2.5m sq m of retail space.

But vacancies within existing malls stood at about 15-30 per cent in the second quarter of this year and no new large malls are expected to be completed before 2014, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, the property consultants.

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