AFI Palace Cotroceni sees shops change, maintains occupancy rate

AFI Palace Cotroceni, which opened last year on a 214,000-sqm surface, is close to 96 percent occupied, Israel Vizel, manager of the Romania malls divisions & AFI Palace Cotroceni, told Business Review.

The high occupancy has been maintained, even though some of the shops have been replaced either because they couldn’t cope with the current economic situation or because they withdrew from the market completely, Vizel said, adding that finding new tenants was a constant process.

“All the time you need to complete the mix of activities and business that you have inside. Some of the businesses inside are not performing as they were expected to in the beginning, so in parallel with renting empty space we also have to replace some of the current operators. (..) Just keep in mind that each percent here is 800 sqm, whereas it is almost 20-30 percent in some other places,” he said in reference to the scale of the project, where one percent can accommodate seven to ten shops of between 80 and 120 sqm.

Some of the brands that are no longer inside AFI Palace are Sergent Major, which has been closed throughout Romania, and Palmers.

To live up to its promise of serving as a complete destination of shopping, entertainment and leisure, AFI Palace has a new area of coffee shops, with brand names such

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as RTC’s Cup & Cino, High Heels, Segafredo and Cinnabon on the list. With this the GM says it is replicating the Lipscani area of Bucharest.

Vizel says the traffic in the mall starts at 50,000-55,000 people a day and towards the end of the week reaches 60,000-75,000, with weekends usually bringing in 90,000- 100,000 people.

The developers of the mall are getting ready to begin the next phase of the project, starting with the three office towers: one parallel to Vasile Milea Boulevard, another two on Timisoara Boulevard.

“All in all we are planning to build around 60,000 sqm. Each tower will have 12,000 sqm of built area. In a very short time we are going to have the building permit; we are in very advanced negotiations with some funding sources to finance those projects,” Vizel said.

Overall, he sees the current context as one where “sales need to be more sophisticated. If it was a more prosperous time you could get better results with less effort, but that is the game, and that is what makes the game interesting and attractive,” he added.