One suspects that it is more mismanagement than just the economy. They have some great locations but their properties tend to decay rapidly.
Tyson’s isn’t that bad and their newer malls like the one in Columbia, MD are very nice.
Older malls though, like the Dallas Galleria or Willowbrook in Wayne, NJ all have technical infrastructure issues that sometimes impact business. Riser management is a problem at all the older facilities (they don’t seem to do any) and after a while phone and data service become problematical and businesses located there spend more money on technical maintenance and coping with things like POS system down time. Then there is Ala Moana in Hawaii. It’s an old mall they GGP bought and have made ho improvements to that I can see.
It is in a class by itself when it comes to dealing with mall management and the infrastructure from phone wiring to plumbing is rotting.
Their properties in Tucson are doing really well, mostly full, had some anchor meltdown which probably hurts but still most of the spots are rented. I read they’ve had 3 properties in Las Vegas on the market for years with no takers. If they don’t have the corporation structured right stuff like that can drag a company down hard, need to be able to cut off the losers.
I’m not a big mall-goer, but I’ve been struck in the last decade or so by the huge renovations and/or expansions of some malls that are entirely geared to very inflexible “upscaling”. While it’s sensible business practice to put more emphasis on high-end retail during boom times, any first-year B-school student should be able to see that the investment horizon for these huge mall renovations/expansions is obviously much longer than any single boom period, and yet there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful flexibility built in to cost-effectively downscale the mall during recessionary periods.
One of the twin malls at King of Prussia had a whole section added with a giant Nordstrom’s. The Nordstrom’s section is configured pretty inflexibly, so it would be hard to turn it into anything other than a single, huge department store, set up as a primary, purposeful destination for shoppers. If it was broken up into smaller stores, they would be so out of the way that most window-shopping passers-by would never see them.
FYI - The Mall in Columbia opened in 1971 and Tyson's Galleria opened in 1988.