Impact of Anchor Tenants in a shopping complex

What is an anchor tenant?

Do you know that a grocery store not only brings visitors to its own but also helps bring audiences to the nearby stores?For example, if Aldi moves into your centre, it will attract other retailers to open stores in your complex as people shop at Aldi for their essential needs and visit nearby stores for casual shopping. Here, Aldi acts as an anchor tenant that not just attracts customers to its own but also the nearby shops, increasing the overall sales of the shopping area.

An anchor tenant is a leading, large retailer that has signed an agreement to lease a significant space, mostly in a shopping mall, but also in any given airport, complex, or neighborhood. The term "anchor" comes from the idea that an anchor will keep ships from drifting due to their size and weight.

Anchor tenants also aid in the sales of other retailers, and contribute to the overall success of the retailers in their surrounding area by being a passive actor that drives overall customer engagement.

Are you really my anchor tenant?

My first question was… who is really the anchor tenant? To answer that, I went through a sample of shoping centers to detect their anchor tenants, detect who actually brings in the most traffic. In the figure below, I have visualized which sectors the anchor tenants belong to.

The results were quite interesting! On Average, 23% of the shops in a shopping area are Anchor tenants, which includes Grocery stores, DIY, and small shops like the post offices, ATMs, Kiosk and Cigarette shops. Out of all the Anchor tenants,** 60% of them are Grocery stores** and they are the primary footfall generators for the shopping centers. However, we must remember that they also occupy the largest space in their complex.

Is it Important to have an Anchor tenant around you?

My next step was to investigate if the anchor tenants really deserve the privilege of having big space and low rent. To measure this, I compared the average visitation of an anchor tenant against the other retail stores.

** An Anchor tenant attracts around 5 times more visitors **than an average store in a shopping mall. This might be one good reason to have a more flexible leasing contract for an anchor tenant.

How do you measure the Pie shared by you and the Anchor tenant?

But do they actually help the other stores get more visitors? This is a very difficult question to answer, since it is hard to quantify how many of their customers actually go to other shops after their visit. To answer that, I got help from Ariadne Analytics, just exported their dashboard with a simple click.