Now there is a lot of talk about the difficulties with sales from retailers, but few people point out even more catastrophic problems of shopping centers: the growth of accounts receivable, the increase in vacancy, the personnel outflow. According to Evgenia Loktionova, director of UTG, the most pressing issue on this list is the economic component. “Currently accounts receivable of shopping and entertainment centers have increased by 60%. At the same time, this situation is largely the result of incompetent work of the staff and lost time. Alas, most are waiting for the war to end and everything to get better, in fact, allowing retailers to live at their own expense. But this is a road to nowhere, since the situation will not improve in the near future, it will be even worse, because the tenants see the situation and take advantage of the management companies’ weakness,” explains Evgenia Loktionova.

Indeed, at present almost all retail outlets are reporting an increase in accounts receivable, which can amount to millions of hryvnias. However, as the retail real estate market experts point out, there is a rule that says that receivables should never exceed the guarantee payment. But for many shopping centers, these figures already differ by several times, and management companies still allow negligent tenants to work, continuing to increase their debt. At the same time, the shopping center must pay utility bills, staff salaries, and most importantly, service its loan. Such shopping centers that are too loyal to tenants, trying to retain operators by any means, not only work in the red, but also create global problems for themselves. “The problem is that now everyone is talking about how bad the retail market is, how sales have fallen, and so on. But they forget that it is even worse for developers, since most shopping centers operate on a loan basis and it is useless for banks to tell that there is a war in the country and there is no money, because tenants have stopped paying. At most, banks will give a deferred payment,” the director of UTG describes the situation.

According to her, if you ask yourself how you can change the situation and what to do, you can often hear advice to go to court. But the operator can refer to force majeure. Therefore, as the manager advises, in the first place, you should never allow the receivables to be higher than the guarantee payment. But if the indicators have already equaled, it is necessary to look for ways to replace the tenant as soon as possible. “At the same time, it is possible to cut the vacated premises if there is such an opportunity and the areas allow. In any case, you need to change the operator or put a temporary one.

So, in order to find a replacement operator, you need to work with professional companies that communicate with the entire market or offer an advantageous division of the area. In other words, you need to look for compromise options. Otherwise, the market will see a growing number of examples of shopping centers that, due to their incompetence, have lost tenants, do not generate income and are unprofitable, being unable to even close to zero in terms of costs.

According to experts, the shopping and entertainment center does not have time to sit around waiting for the war to end and everything to get better on the market. “Yes, there is a war, inflation is observed, the foreign currencies exchange rate is growing, the population solvency is falling, there are problems with logistics. A lot of things, right? – states the leader. – But one tenant is looking for solutions, discounts goods, changes staff, recruits new ones. In other words, it does something and thus generates traffic and sales. And another tenant, often sitting abroad, tries to manage at a distance. As a result, the store does not sell. Or there are other reasons – the lack of goods, then how to make a turnover? Either there is no understanding of the market when it is necessary to offer discounts and sales to stimulate customers in order to be competitive, etc., operators sit still and wait for the same buyer to find them. And at the same time, such retailers do not realize that they themselves are to blame for the collapse of the business, but they say that the shopping center is to blame.”

Summarizing, we can say that now you should not sit and wait until the war is over, everything will work out and be fine. It is much more efficient to take a professional management company, which has a competent lawyer, an experienced manager, as well as rental managers who can bring the shopping center out of debt. As an example, Evgenia Loktionova cites such shopping and entertainment center as Megamall, Global UA, or Smart Plaza Polytech. So quite recently, the company signed a lease agreement with a new operator, and in early September, the first Citrus store in Zhytomyr will open in the Global UA shopping and entertainment center in the place previously occupied by the operator O’STIN, who left our market. Summing up, the manager emphasized: as practice shows, if the shopping and entertainment center’s receivables grow and many believe that this is a problem in the market, this is not so. In reality, the shopping and entertainment center has a problem, because the heads of management companies sit in the past and do not see tomorrow, but it has already arrived, and the market is not dead, but is in motion.