Despite the existence of Sales Reporting and Casual Mall Licensing Codes, competition between retailers has been anything but clean (and only seemed to worsen when landlords get involved).
However, that might see change as new versions of these Codes will be put into place to clear up any lack of transparency that causes abusive practices between the involved parties.
These new codes tackle these problems in two distinct ways.
Casual Mall Licensing – Pop Up Kiosks
Past iterations of the Casual Mall Licensing Code didn’t address an issue that involved the placement of pop up kiosks that wind up compromising access and vision to retailers (especially those with long-term leases).
It may not seem much, but this has also led to rival brands to take unnecessary advantage over the use of said kiosks to catch customer attention. In other words, these rivals simply place a kiosk to draw attention away from the retailer and stir the hive of competitiveness to more toxic levels.
With the new version of the code, however, landlords will be held more accountable if these practices occur in their centres (even if they still reserve the right to provide leases among competing brands).
Sales Reporting Code – Data Collating and Collection
In the new Sales Reporting Code, landlords are also given more responsibility to ramp up the transparency of their collection and collation methods.
Now there is a mutual obligation between the two parties. Retailers provide their individual share of sales data in exchange for access to more sales and other marketing information gathered by the landlord.
In practice though, the lack of transparency until this point meant that only the data from the landlord was treated as somehow more valid and no further explanation is allowed to justify differences between the two (which, in turn, creates tension when discussing occupancy costs).
All in all, these two new codes clearly indicate that both lawmakers and stakeholders better understand that the devil is in the details with regards to competition in the shopping centre scene. Hopefully, these new measures will finally cool things down and keep it fair for all parties involved.
“We’re never going to take the Lord out of Landlord, but the revision and collective administration of these Codes by the Peak Retailer Associations are a positive move to levelling the playing field for Lessees” states Phil Chapman Director of Lease1
.jpg){kind=tracking}
