Grupo Sambil, being Venezuela’s largest mall developer, may know a thing or two about challenges. In 2012 the company paid €17 million for Avenida M40, a now 13-year-old mall in Leganés, near the city of Madrid, that had closed two years earlier owing to nose-diving sales and spiraling debt.
“We bet on the country’s economic recovery and changes in the shopping habits of its consumers,” said Arnold Moreno, general director of Grupo Sambil in Spain. Other foreign investors also began entering Spain toward the end of its recession (which ran from 2008 through 2013), recognizing value in its retail real estate. “It is another investment alternative in a mature and stable market,” Moreno said.
Sambil spent €55 million overhauling the 42,000-square-metre mall, which was at press time set for a March reopening as Sambil Outlet Madrid. “It’s now a mixed retail project, with outlet stores accounting for 50 percent of its [gross leasable area],” said Moreno. Low-cost fashion retailers occupy about a third of the retail space, and the remainder comprises food or entertainment tenants. In all, there are 177 shops, distributed among the three floors, and roughly 2,300 parking spaces. “Our main differentiator from other Madrid malls is that we are the biggest outlet closest to the city of Madrid,” said Moreno.
Sambil Outlet Madrid is targeting middle-class shoppers and tourists and is anticipating roughly 10 million visitors per year. By January 85 percent of the mall’s leasable area had been leased to such tenants as Cortefiel, El Corte Inglés, Inditex and Mango. The shopping center also houses a food and entertainment tenants.
For Sambil, the Madrid mall is the latest of several foreign forays aimed at diluting its reliance on Venezuela. Sambil owns and operates seven centers in Venezuela and two in the Caribbean — in the Dominican Republic and Curaçao. The company has plans for one in Guaynabo,
Puerto Rico.
“Spain is an opportunity that we could not waste,” said Alfredo Cohen, director of Grupo Sambil. His father, Salomón Cohen, established the company in 1958 as a construction firm that became one of Venezuela’s major real estate developers, embracing housing, offices and hotels as well as retail. Spain and Venezuela have important parallels besides language, Alfredo Cohen says, citing a similar taste for fashionable clothing, food and music. “The outlet format is also gaining popularity and growing internationally,” he said. “Sambil Outlet Madrid will be a huge success.”
Spain boasts 15 outlet malls, four of them in Madrid, according to Spanish mall trade group Asociación Española de Centros y Parques Comerciales. At press time the association still had not determined whether to classify the project as an outlet center or a regional mall with a “large outlet component,” according to Jesús Domínguez, who heads up market analysis for the organization. “If Sambil is classified as an outlet, it will be the biggest in that category [in Madrid], considering that the next in the list only has 24,000 square meters of [gross leasable area],” said Domínguez.
The center joins 96 malls that cater to the nearly 6.5 million inhabitants of the Autonomous Community of Madrid and is the first to open in that market in two years.