Malls with revenue models are new face of retail

New Delhi: Zero advertising, but a fresh approach has made South Delhi's Select City Walk, India's most sought after and talked about retail destination. It's the first mall in the country to adopt invitation based leasing.

Indian mall developers generally acquire land, pre-sell individual shops to investors or interested parties, accumulate capital and then construct the mall, without any occupancy concerns.

However, the Select group has adopted a lease or revenue sharing model. So how does that work?

Says DLF Executive Director, Ajay Khanna, "The owner retains the asset. There is a minimum guarantee or a percentage of sale, whichever is higher. The developer's income can change daily depending on how well he runs the mall."

No percentage has been fixed, and deals vary from retailer to retailer. A Rs 500 crore project, Select City Walk has a catchment area of 1.8 million people from A and B homes and hopes to break even in less than a year.

Moving beyond the mall's typical closed box structures, Select City Walk is divided into three parts and brands are placed accordingly.

One third of the area is dedicated to landscape and is themed around the history of Delhi. It will have replicas of monuments like Jantar Mantar and Qutab Minar and this has been designed by a host of Indian and foreign designers.

The management at Select City Walk like to call it a marketplace rather than a mall - where the dome is kept exclusively for luxury brands and the open air frontage will be home to unorgansied players with the aim to create a Tibetean shopping feel. If successful, other developers might be open to this model.

Says CEO & President, Select City Walk, Pranay Sinha, "If it is commercially viable, and it is commercially workable, yes we are open to the idea."

Though we have to wait and watch how other developers adopt this model, Select City Walk is set to open doors for public in two months time.

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