Retailer Transparency and Landlord Agility

Shopping center and store landlords have been rudely surprised by the speed and breadth of their tenants' downward spiral in the economic implosion of the past year. The number of well-known retailers that have filed for bankruptcy protection ' Linens 'n Things, Circuit City, Mervyn's, KB Toys, and Steve & Barry's, to name a few of the most prominent ' is unprecedented in the retailing world since the Great Depression. These serial collapses are, in turn, wreaking parallel havoc in the real estate industry's malls and main streets across the country. Given the scale of our current national economic catastrophe, this result might not have been completely or even largely avoided by landlords, but, with more sophisticated tenant data, which could have been required in the landlords' form retail leases, the damage might have been mitigated by corrective measures taken earlier in the cycle.