Serious trouble at South Africa’s biggest shopping mall

·6 Jan 2025

Fourways Mall faces significant challenges with many empty stores, low foot traffic, a poor reputation, and struggling financials.

BusinessTech’s recent visit to Fourways Mall confirmed that most of these challenges remain, and that it has a lot of work to do to remedy the situation.

Fourways Mall is the largest shopping centre in South Africa, with a gross lettable area (GLA) of over 178,000 m² and around 350 stores.

After an expensive expansion and revamp in 2019, it became the biggest shopping mall in the country. The owners were upbeat about its future.

However, pumping large amounts of money into Fourways Mall did not produce the desired results, with a big increase in vacant shops.

From 2021 to 2023, Fourways Mall’s vacancy rate increased from 3% to 8%, and net rent per square meter declined from R298 to R262.

Its fair value declined from R9.6 billion in 2020 to R8.04 billion three years later, illustrating its challenges.

Fourways Mall’s performance continued to deteriorate, forcing its owners to take drastic measures to remedy the situation.

It embarked on a turnaround plan aimed at reestablishing Fourways Mall as a top-tier shopping destination.

The strategy included partnering with Flanagan & Gerard as the strategic asset managers and Moolman Group as the property managers.

It is also improving signage for seamless navigation, introducing new tenants, and deploying backup power solutions.

It is improving security through better parking area lighting, upgrading security measures, optimising traffic flow, enlarging parking bays, and revitalising the surrounding area.

Accelerate Property Fund CEO Abri Schneider said they had made significant progress in a very short time.

Initially, the mall focussed on the overall shopper experience and ambience as well as the tenant mix and layout.

“In addition, progress was made with renewing leases as well as signing on a significant number of new leases,” he said.

He said a lot of effort has gone into and continues to re-establish Fourways Mall’s brand, including behind-the-scenes efforts.

It is adding significant entertainment and catering offerings, including padel courts, a running track, and several eateries offering everything from organic produce to fine dining.

In addition, an e-hailing, pick-up, and drop-off area has been created, opening up the entertainment node and enhancing the mall’s accessibility.

BusinessTech visits Fourways Mall

To see whether the turnaround plan has changed Fourways Mall’s fortunes, BusinessTech visited it to see first-hand what is happening there.

Getting to the parking was easy. However, there was no sign of the bigger parking bays or where one would find them.

Although the shopping centre looks better than it did when we visited it earlier in 2024, it clearly continued to struggle with empty stores and low foot traffic.

The Fourways Mall used modern and informative window wraps for empty stores, which made it look better than having one store after another look abandoned.

However, this was mostly used in the busiest areas of the mall. Many other areas were completely deserted, and they did not bother to hide the empty stores.

It did not look like there were any plans to fill these stores, which raises questions on whether there is any demand.

Another striking thing about our visit was that despite it being during the festive season, there were very few people in the Fourways Mall.

We visited Fourways Mall after Sandton City, and the latter was buzzing with people doing Christmas shopping.

We expected Fourways Mall to have similar foot traffic to Sandton City, but that was not the case.

It felt like Fourways Mall was far too large for the number of shoppers, and many whole wings in the centre were ghost towns.

The stores were completely empty, and many others had more shop attendants than clients. Not much commerce was taking place.

When it was time to leave, there was a challenge. The parking payment terminal did not work, and nobody knew what to do.

People were walking around trying to find an alternative, which was challenging. It took a long walk to find a place to pay.

BusinessTech spoke to people living in the area, who said they do not even consider visiting the mall because of its poor reputation.

Although the mall is working hard to address its reputational problems, it still has some way to go before it reaches its goal of being a top-tier shopping destination.