Craig Sheriff

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the value of applying spatial analytical techniques to problems commonly faced by retail property managers. Specifically, this study lays the groundwork for an innovative decision support system that will supply retail property managers with more sophisticated quantitative tools for assessing and improving shopping centre configuration and functionality. The analysis investigates the spatial autocorrelation of several non-anchor shopping centre store metrics using a super-regional shopping centre as a case study. Specifically, a join-count measure is used to test whether stores of the same type are dispersed or clustered in the shopping centre. These results are compared to shopping centre industry conventions regarding the spatial distribution of stores of the same type. In addition, an analysis of an important indicator metric (rent/sales index) is conducted. The final phase of the analysis involves the development of a multivariate linear regression model. This model is used to determine how much variation in the non-anchor stores sales metric can be related to several independent variables including: other store based metrics, pedestrian traffic flow and relative store location in the form of distance based measures.