Choosing a shopping mall location for a store means committing to a multi-year lease, a fit-out and a full team based on the traffic that will pass one specific unit in one specific corridor. It is the decision where a retailer commits the most money on the least data, because the numbers that decide whether the store survives are usually the ones nobody hands over.
You call the leasing manager of a centre you like. She is friendly and organised, and she invites you to visit on a weekday, between 12 and 14 or between 17 and 19. You go at noon. The corridors are busy, the food court is full, and the building looks exactly the way a building looks when someone chooses the hour you see it.
She shows you two available units in two different zones. She quotes rent per square metre for each. When you ask about traffic, she gives you one entrance count for the whole building: 50,000 visitors on a normal day, over 100,000 at weekends. Two units, two zones, one number. You say you will think about it, and you mean it.
Here is what that one number cannot tell you. It cannot tell you whether the zone with the cheaper unit dies after lunch. It cannot tell you whether the weekend surge ever reaches the first floor. It cannot tell you whether stores in your category in that corridor convert passers-by or watch them walk past. A building-level count is a fact about the building. Your lease is a bet on a corridor.
So you do what every serious expansion manager does. You come back unannounced on a Tuesday afternoon and again on a sunny Saturday. You walk both corridors at the dead hours, not the chosen ones. And you find two store managers in your own category and ask them, quietly, how it is going.
In the first mall, the answer goes like this: we mostly see the mall when the invoice arrives. There is some marketing, a few events a year, we run our own social media. No, we do not get footfall data. It goes quiet after lunch, and weekends depend on the weather. It is not the story the leasing manager told you at noon. You do not open there.
In the second mall, a comparable centre with a comparable rent level, the store manager pulls out her phone. The mall shares data with us, she says. I can see how many people pass my door, my capture rate against the corridor, and how I rank against other stores in my category. My team gets a weekly ranking, the mall gives a prize to the winner, so the staff actually care. The marketing is real and we can see what it does to traffic. If I were you, I would open in every centre this group owns.
Same category. Same rent level. Two different decisions. The difference was never the building. It was whether the landlord shared the numbers.
According to the New Look UK shop fit-out cost guide, a standard UK retail fit-out is priced at 300 to 1,500 pounds per square metre before fixtures and lighting. Heksia puts typical European build-outs at roughly 200 to 1,000 euro per square metre. Add the deposit, opening stock, staff hired weeks before the first sale, systems, signage and launch marketing, and for a premium concept the total before opening day runs well into six figures. For luxury formats, far beyond. All of it committed before you know whether the zone works, and two months in you cannot stop.
Now set that against the data gap. Retail Week and Yardi surveyed 50 retail directors responsible for store portfolios and found that only 42 percent of retailers in shopping centres receive footfall data from their landlord. 58 percent do not. Most retailers are signing the largest single commitment in their expansion budget without the one dataset that would tell them if the location can carry it.
The second mall runs store-level counting in front of every unit plus a tenant revenue platform that works both ways. Tenants report turnover in about two minutes a day, or automatically from the POS. In return, each tenant sees mall footfall, passing traffic at their own door, their capture rate, an index against their category and the whole centre, and a weekly ranking. Vemco Group's VemTenant, combined with VemCount sensors at entrances and store fronts, is built for exactly this two-way exchange. Vemco is a Danish software company founded in 2005 in Fredericia, with 55,000+ installations across 98+ countries, and its platform is used by 800+ shopping malls, most running both footfall counting and tenant reporting. VemTenant has been part of the platform since 2013, and a recent acquisition added property management to the same system.
One practitioner detail worth knowing: counting accuracy at a store front depends on real conditions, meaning lighting, ceiling height, store layout and how visitors behave at the threshold. Serious vendors state accuracy as a contractual minimum, in Vemco's case 96 percent, with typically 98 to 99 percent achieved when conditions allow. Any supplier quoting a flat guaranteed figure for every doorway has not installed many sensors.
If the leasing manager answers all five with a dashboard rather than a promise, you are standing in mall two. Leasing directors reading this should note the reverse: prospects who make real budget decisions are already asking these questions, and the centres that can answer them win the tenants worth keeping.
Why would a landlord share footfall with tenants? Because tenants who can see their capture rate and ranking report turnover more reliably and renew more often. Malls that share data get better data back, and better data supports leasing, marketing and rent negotiations for both sides.
What is capture rate? The share of people passing a store front who actually enter the store. It is the metric that separates a location problem from a store problem: low passing traffic points at the corridor, low capture rate points at the window, the offer or the team.
Does a tenant see other tenants' sales? No. Each tenant sees only their own store, category averages and mall totals. The ranking motivates without exposing anyone's figures.
If you want to see the second mall from both sides of the table, the landlord view and the tenant dashboard with door traffic, capture rate and weekly rankings, book a demo of VemTenant or contact Vemco Group to talk through your next site decision with the data your leasing tour will never show you.