Germany's shopping centres get a new performance yardstick

For years, shopping centre valuation in Germany has rested on a single metric: rent. Harald Ortner, chairman of the German Council of Shopping Places (GCSP), illustrated the problem with characteristic directness at the Handelsimmobilienkongress in Berlin last week — in a lively panel discussion guided with practised authority by Prof. Dr. Verena Rock, president of the GIF Society for Real Estate and Economic Research.

A centre Ortner had evaluated for fifteen years, using six rent assessments annually — three bakers, three hairdressers — consistently returned a score of 1.5. Was that a good location? Would a serious retailer sign immediately? The answer, of course, depends on everything the rent figure doesn't capture.

That gap is what a new performance model, developed over five years by the GCSP in partnership with GIF, is designed to close. Launching in full this year, the model aggregates 19 sub-criteria across six measurement categories — footfall, building quality, sustainability, rent structure and more — drawing on data that centre operators already hold but have rarely shared. Getting that data access, Ortner acknowledged, took the better part of a decade.

Operators and owners have now opened up, persuaded that the model handles their data responsibly and produces results that reflect reality. International investors are already asking about it.

Why investors need more than a rent roll

For Iris Schöberl — president of ZIA, Germany's principal real estate lobby, and in her day job, CEO of Columbia Threadneedle's Munich-based investment platform, which has long-standing experience in German retail property — the model addresses a problem that has materially constrained capital flows. Post-Covid, investors withdrew from retail property across the board. The ZIA's own market data now points to what Schöberl described as "positive stability" returning to the sector. But that recovery is fragile, and it depends on something the market has historically lacked: transparent, comparable performance data that investors, lenders and tenants can all read from the same page.

Without it, the conversation between owners and financiers reduces to two or three data points and a request. With it, the model can support rent negotiations, benchmark comparable centres and — critically — give lenders the basis to finance retail property with greater confidence.

The regulatory picture is less encouraging. Schöberl identified noise emission rules as one of the most persistent barriers to repurposing retail space for mixed use. Traffic noise is measured inside buildings; retail noise outside. The asymmetry makes mixed-use development legally complex and locally contested. Federal government can legislate relief, and some is coming. But municipalities have to want to use it, and many don't, partly because they lack the resources to process applications. Until communes are properly funded, federal permissions remain largely theoretical.

Her second demand was unambiguous: fully digital planning applications, end to end. The current reality — applications submitted digitally, then printed out and processed manually — is not digital transformation. ZIA is pushing for a complete digital workflow, parallel departmental processing and a completeness standard that defines exactly what must be submitted and nothing more.

Rents, risk-sharing and what cities are actually for

Alexander von Preen, CEO of Intersport Deutschland, brought the tenant perspective — and a concrete expansion problem. Intersport is looking for 100 new city-centre sites at 1,000 to 1,500 square metres. Finding suitable space is increasingly difficult. Cities remain the priority, but the right-sized units in the right locations simply aren't available quickly enough.

On rent structure, von Preen made an argument that went beyond Intersport's immediate interests. Turnover-linked rents — where landlord and tenant share in the upside of a well-performing location — should not be a concession extracted in distressed markets. They should be standard in strong ones too. If rents, sales and returns on investment all grow together, that case is far more compelling to new retail concepts and brands than a fixed lease in a centre with uncertain footfall.

Schöberl added the international dimension. Combined base-plus-turnover structures are already standard in markets like Italy, where banks and investors are comfortable treating the turnover component as bankable income. German banks remain more conservative, defaulting to base rent alone as the underwriting metric. That needs to change — and more transparent performance data is the mechanism that will change it.

Von Preen also raised a structural concern about city centre retail more broadly. As brands increasingly open flagships financed through marketing budgets rather than genuine trading economics, two layers of the retail ecosystem are effectively removed. Cities risk becoming attractive but commercially hollow — full of beautiful shops that are not really retail businesses. The multi- brand, multi-category model that characterises German retail, he argued, is worth defending.

The panel's closing statements pointed beyond the model itself. Schöberl's priority: remove the regulatory and municipal barriers that prevent retail space from being repurposed. Von Preen's: restore safety, cleanliness and quality to public spaces. Ortner's: more green, water and health infrastructure in city centres, reorienting them around quality of life rather than pure transaction.

The performance model is the measurement tool. The harder and more consequential work is creating the conditions it will have something worth measuring.