A membership organization for the shopping-center and retail real-estate industry: developers, owners, lenders, brokers, retailers, and the service firms around them. It publishes center-type definitions, trade-area ranges, and research used in site selection, leasing, and public policy. The group is based in New York and runs education, advocacy, and the RECon deal-making conference.
What It Publishes and Why Site Teams Use It
Retail location work needs a shared vocabulary for what a “neighborhood center” is versus a regional mall. The organization supplies that vocabulary: typical gross leasable area bands, anchor mix, acreage, and primary trade-area size. A neighborhood center is convenience-oriented, often supermarket-anchored, with a trade area of about three miles. A community center stretches farther and usually carries a discount, drug, or home-improvement box. Super-regional malls pull from 5 to 25 miles. Those ranges are planning tools, not laws, but they keep a 6,000-square-foot dining room from being underwritten as if it had a mall’s catchment.
The same research stack shows up in parking studies. Joint work with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) produced recommended parking ratios by center size and by how much of the center is restaurants, entertainment, or cinema. Municipal codes still cite those tables when they set stalls per 1,000 square feet of Gross Leasable Area (GLA).
Center Types at a Glance
| Center Type | Typical Role | Primary Trade Area |
| Neighborhood | Convenience, often a supermarket anchor | About 3 miles |
| Community | General merchandise plus convenience | About 3 to 6 miles |
| Regional / super-regional mall | Fashion and destination retail | About 5 to 25 miles |
| Strip / convenience | Row of stores with parking in front | Local, often under 3 miles |
Use the table to sanity-check a lease, not to skip a drive-time study. A strip center on a five-lane arterial can still fail if the turn-in is hostile, even when the “type” looks right.
How Practitioners Meet the Organization
- Definitions: shared language for GLA, anchors, and trade-area size so a broker flyer and a lender model are talking about the same asset.
- Research: sales, occupancy, and industry statistics compiled with Census, CoStar, and similar sources.
- Events: RECon and other meetings where retailers, landlords, and capital actually make deals.
- Advocacy: policy work on retail real estate, property tax, and related regulation.
For a marketer or an independent operator, the useful takeaway is the classification system and the parking and trade-area numbers. For a landlord, it is the deal network. Either way, the letters on a site-selection memo usually point here, not to a software vendor.
