Glitzy Orchard Road malls losing their glam as locals turn to suburban retail centres

The posh shopping havens are struggling to capture customers.

A dark cloud is looming over the glamorous malls of Orchard Road. The glitzy district has always been a draw for tourists, but locals are shunning these central shopping complexes for smaller regional centers in the suburbs.

According to a report by Colliers, the rental gap between prime retail space in Orchard Road over similar space in regional centres further narrowed in Q3, from 8.4% in the preceding quarter to 7.5% this quarter.

The report notes that this narrowing rental gap illustrates that Orchard Road malls are heavily dependent on vanishing tourist dollars, while regional centres enjoy a steady flow of footfalls because these centres are patronized by locals.

"With greater pressure on malls in Orchard Road which heavily depend on tourist patronage, we are likely to see a minor adjustment of -1 per cent to 0 per cent in the average monthly gross rents for prime ground-floor retail space. Regional Centres are expected to see a comparatively-better rental growth of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent for the entire year,” said Colliers International Director of Research & Advisory Chia Siew Chuin.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia