A mall for the base of the pyramid
Valor Econômico
Every day, 1.3 million people pass by Largo Treze, one of the busiest junctions of the municipality of São Paulo, coming from and going to the South Side, the most populous area of the municipality. It will be in the middle of this swirl of people, cars, street vendors and all sorts of stores that REP will build its first shopping mall designed exclusively to the classes that are at the base of the social pyramid - it is estimate that only 20% of this population goes to shopping malls in the country.
The undertaking located at Largo Treze, which will cost R$ 200 million (US$ 116.3 million), is already being built and should be ready on October 29, 2010, in an area that used to be a parking lot. Around it there are the bus and subway terminals, the largest Poupa Tempo of the Municipal Administration (fast service agency) and a Uninove university campus. Inside the mall, large retailers like Magazine Luiza, McDonald's and Bob's will share the space with small businesses, like Jeca Tatu - a self-service restaurant - and Casa dos Churros. As the Largo Treze shopping mall was made to attract the "small street stores", the mall will receive nearly 400 operations in its 17 thousand square meters of leasable area, twice as much as a traditional commercial center.
"Instead of merely adapting a conventional shopping mall for the popular street commerce, we did the opposite. Our purpose was to create a new concept that could bring the popular commerce in a more organized and comfortable environment", affirms Marcos Romiti, President of REP, a company controlled by LDI (Lindencorp Group) and by PDG Realty. The mall is being built in a little usual way. Besides the conventional area for large operations, the rest of the space will be divided into modules, of only eight to ten square meters, which will be rented at a fixed price of R$ 3 thousand (US$ 1.74 thousand). According to Romiti, the value cannot be very different from that of the occupation of a street store.
According to Romiti, the goal is to replicate the new concept of a popular shopping center, which was named Shopping Mais, in other places. REP is already negotiating the acquisition of, at least, three other lots. The focus of the company are small shopping malls, of up to 15 thousand square meters of gross rentable area (ABL), and small street commercial centers, known as "strip malls" - the company already has 18 in São Paulo, in places like Rua Cardoso de Almeida and in the neighborhood of Vila Madalena, in the West Side.