The Most Expensive Square Metres in the Mall Are the Ones Nobody Counts

Specialty leasing is the short-term rental of common-area space in a shopping centre: carts, kiosks, pop-up units and brand activations, from a few days to twelve months. It is priced on visibility and almost never measured.

Sit with that second sentence for a moment, because it describes the strangest pricing model in retail real estate. On a rent per square metre basis, the atrium position and the escalator-adjacent cart are often the most expensive spaces in the building. They are also the only spaces sold with no traffic evidence at all. The inline tenant paying less per square metre gets a counted door. The brand paying a premium for the atrium gets a floor plan and a handshake.

The car in the atrium

A car brand rents the atrium for a month. The dealer group pays a premium for the position, puts a new model on a turntable, staffs it with two people and hopes. At month end the brand marketing manager reports to head office: good exposure, strong interest, several test drives booked. Head office asks the obvious question. How many people saw the car?

Nobody knows. The mall knows the entrance count, not how many walked past the atrium, how many stopped, or how long they stayed. So the activation is sold as a feeling, renewed as a favour, and cancelled the first time the marketing budget is cut. Every specialty leasing manager reading this has lived some version of that phone call, and it is rarely about whether the activation worked. It is about whether anyone can prove it did.

Why common areas became the data gap

Inline stores have doors, and doors can be counted. Kiosks, carts and pop-ups sit in open corridors, atriums and next to escalators, and because they are open on all sides they have historically been left out of the counting plan entirely. The industry glossaries put the units at carts around 40 to 80 square feet, kiosks around 100 to 200 square feet, and pop-up shops between 200 and 2,000 square feet, positioned precisely because the traffic is high and leased anywhere from a few weeks to a year (Rentail.space specialty leasing glossary; ShoppingCenters.com, What is specialty leasing).

The result is a structural absurdity. The specialty leasing manager sells the best-located, highest rent per square metre space in the building with the least evidence behind it. Rate cards get built from a map and an argument. Renewal conversations rest on anecdotes from the kiosk operator. And when a brand partnership manager tries to build a portfolio deal across several centres, there is no comparable number between properties to build it on.

What changes when the corridor gets counted like a store

With sensors at zone and store level, not only at the entrances, a common-area unit gets the same three numbers an inline store gets. Passing traffic through the corridor or atrium during the activation. Stops and dwell, meaning how many people paused and for how long. And for a pop-up with a defined footprint, capture, meaning how many actually entered.

This is where the tooling matters. Vemco Group, a Danish software company founded in 2005 in Fredericia with 20+ years in people counting and 55,000+ installations across 98+ countries, covers this with VemCount at entrances, zones and store fronts, VemTrack for dwell and flow in open areas, and VemTenant, part of the platform since 2013, to turn the numbers into reports every tenant, permanent or temporary, can actually read. More than 800 shopping malls use the platform, most with both footfall counting and tenant reporting, and a recent acquisition added property management alongside it.

Combined, that means the mall can send the brand a one-page report at month end: passing traffic per day, stops, average dwell, a comparison with the same corridor the month before, and where the tenant reported sales, turnover per visitor. That report goes to head office. It is the difference between a one-month trial and a twelve-month contract.

Four uses for the same data

• 1. Pricing. Common-area positions priced on measured passing traffic, corridor by corridor, instead of a map and an argument. The corridor that carries twice the traffic can finally carry the rate to match.
• 2. Renewals. A brand that can show head office measured passers-by and stops signs again. A brand that can show nothing does not. This is the single biggest lever on specialty leasing income, because renewal is cheaper than acquisition in this channel just as in every other.
• 3. Placement. Cross-shopping and dwell data show which corridors feed which categories, so a cosmetics pop-up goes where fashion traffic actually flows rather than where a unit happens to be free.
• 4. Event measurement. An activation in the calendar shows up as a change in traffic in its zone and in the tenants around it, so marketing can show what the atrium event did for the food court, not just what it cost.

What the brand gets, and why they come back

The same principle that makes inline tenants report turnover applies here: give the tenant something they value in exchange for the data you need. A kiosk operator who receives a weekly traffic and dwell report treats the mall as a partner with numbers rather than a landlord with an invoice. A brand marketing manager who can attach a measured report to next year's budget request comes back, and often comes back asking about your other centres.

One thing implementers learn quickly: define the measurement zone before the activation is booked, not after the fixtures arrive. A turntable, a temporary wall or a queue barrier placed inside the sensor's coverage after installation will distort dwell readings, so the zone boundaries belong in the licence agreement alongside the floor plan. It takes ten minutes at booking and saves a dispute at reporting.

Short answers to the questions you will get internally

Can open-area units be counted accurately? Yes, with sensors placed to cover the zone rather than a door. The platform reports passing traffic and dwell by zone, and accuracy should be stated contractually with a minimum and a typical figure rather than a single number: a contractual minimum of 96%, typically 98 to 99% when lighting, layout and visitor behaviour allow.

Does the temporary tenant need to report sales? Not necessarily. Traffic, stops and dwell already give the brand a measured report. Where the tenant does report turnover, the platform adds turnover per visitor.

Who inside the mall uses this? Specialty leasing sells on it, marketing measures events with it, and asset management uses it to price common-area positions across the portfolio.

If your atrium and corridors are sold on a map, see what they look like on a dashboard at vemcogroup.com/industries/malls. And if you want to walk through how zone-level counting would work in your specific centre, with your specific activation calendar, talk to Vemco Group and bring your rate card. That is the document this data changes first.