Retail Experts Discuss Industry Hurdles

These are excerpts from a roundtable discussion sponsored by Real Estate Media and Sperry Van Ness. The full text will appear in the December issue of Real Estate New York magazine.

NEW YORK CITY-Retail observers could see some store closings and chain-store bankruptcies on the horizon as a result of challenges facing the economy, including the recent credit crunch, according to a panel discussion here at the Penn Club of New York. Expect closures by tenants that almost exclusively inhabit B centers, they said.

“Lower-quality tenants could have bankruptcies, hitting low-end mall REITs,” said Ambika Goel, a retail-REIT analyst at Citibank. Developers of shopping centers could also pull back construction, she said.