➤ Key Highlights
National shopping-center vacancy is roughly 4.4% — below the ~5.3% long-run average.
Overall retail availability is about 4.8% — the lowest on record.
U.S. shopping-center leasing is running at its strongest pace in about 20 years.
Best-in-class grocery-anchored centers are clearing sub-6% cap rates.
Off-price and grocery tenants are driving a disproportionate share of net absorption.
➤ The Signal
The asset class the last cycle wrote off is now a scarcity trade. No new supply plus essential-tenant demand equals structural tightness, and capital is paying record prices for durable, needs-based income.
Retail spent a decade as the consensus short. Almost nothing new got built after 2008, e-commerce fears froze development, and the pandemic emptied marginal centers. That under-building is now the whole story: demand recovered into a supply base that never expanded.
The result is the tightest fundamentals in major U.S. property. Vacancy near record lows and two-decade-high leasing are not a rebound — they are scarcity. When space cannot be replaced, existing centers reprice as irreplaceable.
The tenants underwriting it are defensive by design. Grocers, off-price chains, and service uses fill the rent roll, and 1031 and institutional capital are converging on the same limited pool of grocery-anchored product — compressing cap rates inside 6%.
➤ Implications
Owners of well-located open-air centers hold pricing power they have not had since before 2008. The risk is basis discipline, not demand — paying a sub-6% cap on income that is already near-peak leaves little margin if consumer spending softens.
➤ Key Takeaway
Retail didn’t die — it stopped being built, and scarcity turned the survivors into the safest income in the market.
Source: CoStar / Cushman & Wakefield / ICSC — June 2026
