Each person who lives in Bucharest goes to a mall for shopping, a movie, a cup of coffee or a mere walk every five or six days, considering the population of the city stands at 1.68 million people, according to the 2011 census results.
The mall with the highest traffic in Bucharest and in the entire country for that matter remains AFI Palace Cotroceni in the west of the city. It was inaugurated in 2009 after a EUR300 million investment, the largest budget allocated to a real estate investment in Romania.
AFI Europe attracts around 52,000 people every day, something only the Roger Waters concert or the games of Steaua, the local football team with most supporters in Bucharest, with Chelsea last March and Legia Warsaw did. The stores in the mall see annual sales of EUR200 million, while the owners collect some EUR30 million in rent.
Second most popular mall in Bucharest by number of visitors is Unirea Shopping Center (40,000), located in the center of the city, followed by Baneasa Shopping City (northern Bucharest), which attracts about 35,000 people a day, according to the latest data supplied by its owners.
The sales of the stores in the Baneasa Shopping City amount to more than EUR170 million a year, while the sales of the Carrefour hypermarket in the complex amount to some EUR100 million a year and IKEA sells another EUR100 million’s worth.
The first mall opened in Romania fifteen years ago, Bucuresti Mall in Vitan, close to the city center, ranks fourth among the malls in Bucharest, with a daily average of 33,000 to 35,000 visitors, according to Razvan Gaita, chief executive officer of the shopping center;s developer, Anchor Grup. Plaza Romania, the second mall of the company, is seeing 23,000 to 25,000 visitors a day, as it has a vacancy rate of 30%, Gaita says. Both Anchor Grup malls are due for a makeover this year.
Sun Plaza, the largest mall in southern Bucharest, welcomed 12.1 million visitors last year or a daily average of 33,000, a new record for the center inaugurated in early 2010, according to the data owners S Immo supplied to Mediafax.
The newcomer among the malls in the city, Promenada, in the Floreasca area connecting the north to the center of Bucharest, is currently attracting about 23,000 visitors a day during the week and 25,000 on weekends. The traffic should increase, however, once the office developments in the area have been delivered and fully rented.
One of the centers with the best traffic performance last year is Militari Shopping Center in the west of the city. Visitor numbers stood at 9.5 million in 2013 (a daily average of 26,000 people), up 20% on 2012, its owners said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)