There’s anecdotal evidence in my area, that there are numerous vacancies in malls. I’m not aware of any malls having shut down entirely, but they are definitely seeing tenants relocate or go out of business.
Here in my regional town (within Germany), some guys bought a property and twelve years ago built a mall....just adjacent to a railway station and figured that if you build it....’they would come’.
Like you say....numerous vacancies are obvious. I’d say of the forty store-fronts in the fairly modern structure...fewer than 15 have a business operating. There are two eateries still left....both a ‘mom-and-pop’ type operation.
So what did the brilliant guys do? They tossed their original plan....brought in fresh capital, and are building an extension onto this for 40-percent more building structure. I put the survival rate of this at no more than four years.
The local mall here has lost 3 of its 5 anchor department stores. The whole mall needs to be bulldozed and the site re-developed. It’s less than a mile from a recent $1 billion development, and a $900 million development is going in diagonally across a surface intersection so it isn’t like it is in a troubled part of town.