“The services and amenities for the future residents are differentiating factors that may help homes sell faster. In areas with heavy pedestrian traffic, using the ground floor for retail space is preferable to apartments that would be harder to sell due to noise and security,” says Bogdan Marcu, partner retail agency with real estate consultant Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.
The strategy to develop retail space on the ground floor of apartment buildings has already been applied by the developers of Rotar Park Residence (an investment of Turkey’s Eskiocak family), One Cotroceni Park (One United Properties) and Cloud 9 (Akcent Development).
The stores already opened or about to on the ground floor of Rotar Park Residence alone include a Help Net pharmacy, a Pepco and a Carrefour Express convenience store. The representatives of the developers did not respond to ZF’s request for comment on what other stores were due to open.
Rotar Park Residence, near the Pacii subway station, numbers about 1,300 homes (from studios to four-room apartments) and includes 3,200 square meters of retail space, its website says. The website shows another project Rotar Park 2, near the first, which will deliver 418 apartments currently under construction. It should be completed by December 2020.
“Developers usually allocate the ground floor area to retail concepts because they need to be easily accessible to residents. To do as best as it can, a retailer must target both residents and people nearby, who are not residents. Except for when the project is in a very good shopping location, the retail area stands at 5% to 10% of the area of a residential project.”
Residential projects that include retail space on the ground floor are usually medium-sized and large, because the number of residents in high enough to justify ample retail space.
Most of the retail space is allocated to a supermarket, followed by cleaning services, pharmacy or coffee shop. The very large projects also include a gym, a pet shop, restaurants, medical services, kindergarten, afterschool facilities or playgrounds, where the space allows.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)