Provincial general stores turning into supermarkets

It is only a matter of years before small commercial spaces and street shops become extinct. People will turn to hypermarkets, malls or department stores. This trend is already showing into the evolution of the rents for commercial spaces.

Of the total sales, 85% will come from these types of stores and only 15% from small shops. This is how the commercial landscape will look like, in the opinion of Sergiu Stapler, general manager of United Capital SA.

“Just consider the rents on Magheru Blvd after the Bucharest Mall came along: they practically dropped to one third,” Stapler says. United Capital is a company administrating 85,000-100,000 sqm of commercial spaces from 13 “general” stores in 11 cities.

The stores were bought by the investment funds operating on the Romanian market and held by the US-based New Century Holdings (NCH). The most representative such fund is Broadhurst. NCH invested more than $10 million in the acquisition of these stores.

NCH hired Stapler by a five-year management contract to turn these spaces into a department store chain. All the stores will operate under a sole name and under a sole concept. Over the next few months, United Capital is planning to buy another 3-6 general stores in order to eventually manage 150,000 sqm of commercial spaces, but has not store in Bucharest yet. “Should something come up in Bucharest, we’re surely interested in it,” Stapler says.