Finding the right retail location is critical to your business success. Customer traffic, visibility, accessibility, and co-tenancy all affect sales performance and profitability. Whether you need space for restaurants, shops, services, or entertainment venues, we help you find and lease retail properties throughout Texas that position your business for maximum customer access and sales success.
Regional malls and large shopping centers anchored by major department stores offer high customer traffic, extensive parking, climate-controlled environments, and established customer bases. These centers attract national retailers, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Regional center leasing typically involves complex negotiations regarding percentage rent, co-tenancy provisions, operating hours, and merchant association fees.
Community centers anchored by grocery stores, drugstores, or discount retailers provide consistent traffic from regular customer needs. These centers typically range 100,000-400,000 square feet with 10-40 tenants. Community centers work well for service businesses, restaurants, and retailers benefiting from grocery-anchored traffic without regional mall rents.
Smaller strip centers with 10,000-100,000 square feet serve immediate neighborhoods with convenience-oriented businesses. These centers typically feature restaurants, services, small retail, and convenience stores. Strip centers offer more affordable rents than larger centers with adequate parking and visibility for neighborhood-serving businesses.
Standalone retail buildings provide maximum visibility, dedicated parking, drive-through potential, and location control. Freestanding locations work well for destination businesses like restaurants, banks, auto services, and retailers with strong brand recognition. These properties command premium rents but offer advantages for businesses not dependent on shopping center traffic.
Urban retail spaces in downtown areas and mixed-use developments offer walkable customer access, residential density, and vibrant street-level environments. Urban retail serves restaurants, boutiques, services, and businesses appealing to pedestrian traffic. These locations typically lack dedicated parking, requiring customers to use street parking or garages.
Upscale open-air shopping centers designed to feel like main street environments feature premium retailers, restaurants, and entertainment. Lifestyle centers attract affluent customers and create destination shopping experiences. These centers typically require strong retail concepts and command higher rents than traditional strip centers.
Retail success depends heavily on customer traffic and visibility. Vehicle traffic counts indicate potential customer exposure—higher traffic generally means more potential customers seeing your business. Corner locations and pad sites typically provide better visibility than inline spaces. Signage visibility from major roads and at property entrances affects customer awareness. Traffic patterns including ease of entry and exit, left turn accessibility, and traffic light locations affect customer convenience.
Understanding the customer base within your trade area is essential. Population density and growth trends indicate customer base size and potential. Household income levels must align with your price points and offerings. Age demographics should match your target customers. Daytime employment population matters for lunch restaurants and service businesses. Competitor locations and market saturation affect your market share potential.
Neighboring tenants dramatically affect retail success. Anchor tenants like grocery stores, pharmacies, or large retailers drive customer traffic benefiting smaller tenants. Complementary tenants create shopping synergies—coffee shops near bookstores, nail salons near hair salons. Competing tenants may be problematic depending on market size. Strong tenant mix with well-managed properties indicates landlord quality and long-term viability.
Adequate convenient parking is essential for most retail. Parking ratios of 4-5 spaces per 1,000 square feet are typical for retail. Parking location relative to your space affects convenience—parking directly in front is ideal. ADA-compliant accessible parking must be available. Easy ingress and egress from major roads without complex turning movements improves customer access.
Evaluate competitive landscape including direct competitors within your trade area, their strengths and weaknesses, market gaps you can fill, and whether the market can support another business like yours. Some competition validates market demand while oversaturation makes success difficult.
Retail leases typically include base rent plus percentage rent provisions. Base rent is fixed monthly rent regardless of sales. Percentage rent requires tenants to pay additional rent based on gross sales once sales exceed defined breakpoints. For example, a lease might require 6% of gross sales exceeding $1 million annually. Percentage rent allows landlords to participate in tenant success while providing some downside protection for tenants during slow periods.
Retail tenants typically pay proportionate share of common area maintenance including parking lot maintenance and striping, landscaping and irrigation, exterior lighting, trash removal, property insurance, property management, and marketing and promotional costs. CAM charges vary widely by property, typically ranging $3-12 per square foot annually. Understanding CAM charges and what’s included is essential for budgeting total occupancy costs.
Shopping centers often require tenants to contribute to merchant associations funding collective marketing and promotional activities. Fees typically range from a percentage of rent to fixed dollar amounts. Evaluate whether merchant association activities actually benefit your business or primarily serve anchor tenants.
Retail leases typically include operating covenants requiring tenants to maintain specific business hours (often matching center hours), remain continuously open for business (preventing dark stores), maintain minimum inventory and staffing levels, participate in center promotions and events, and maintain store appearance standards. These covenants protect center vibrancy but limit tenant operational flexibility.
Exclusive use clauses prevent landlords from leasing to competing businesses. For example, a pizza restaurant might negotiate exclusivity preventing landlords from leasing to other pizza restaurants. Exclusive use protections are valuable but landlords resist broad exclusivity limiting leasing flexibility. Balance your need for protection against realistic competitive threats.
Co-tenancy clauses protect tenants if anchor tenants or key co-tenants close or leave. Provisions typically allow reduced rent, conversion to percentage-rent-only, or lease termination if specified anchors aren’t operating. Co-tenancy protections prevent being stuck in dying centers after major tenants leave, though landlords resist strong co-tenancy provisions.
Retail spaces often require substantial improvements including storefront design and signage, interior finishes reflecting brand standards, display fixtures and millwork, specialized lighting, point-of-sale systems and technology infrastructure, HVAC systems appropriate for retail environments, restrooms meeting ADA requirements, and security systems. Restaurant spaces additionally require commercial kitchen equipment, grease traps and hood systems, dining room finishes, and extensive plumbing and electrical.
Retail improvement costs typically range $75-200+ per square foot depending on business type and finish quality. Restaurants often require $150-300+ per square foot for full build-out. Landlords may provide tenant improvement allowances of $10-50 per square foot, though allowances for inline retail spaces in existing centers are often minimal. Negotiating adequate allowances significantly affects your upfront capital requirements.
We start by understanding your retail concept, target customers, required space size, critical location factors (traffic, visibility, demographics), budget parameters, and timeline. Clear concept definition helps us identify appropriate locations matching your business model.
We research available retail spaces in target markets, analyze traffic patterns and demographics, evaluate competing locations and tenant mix, identify properties matching your criteria, and present options with objective assessments of advantages and challenges.
We coordinate property tours and site visits, evaluate visibility and access, analyze traffic patterns and customer convenience, assess co-tenancy and competitive landscape, review property financials and CAM charges, and verify zoning allows your intended use including any required permits like liquor licenses.
We prepare comprehensive occupancy cost analyses including base rent, percentage rent projections based on sales estimates, CAM charges and merchant association fees, tenant improvement costs and landlord allowances, utilities and operating expenses, and total occupancy cost projections relative to sales forecasts. This analysis ensures you understand complete financial picture.
We negotiate letters of intent establishing key business terms, then negotiate comprehensive lease agreements addressing base rent and percentage rent structures, exclusive use protections, co-tenancy provisions, operating covenants and required hours, signage rights and specifications, tenant improvement allowances and specifications, lease term and renewal options, and all other provisions affecting your occupancy and business operations.
Retail rental rates vary dramatically by location, property type, and space characteristics. Rates are typically quoted as dollars per square foot annually. Neighborhood strip centers typically rent for $18-30 per square foot annually. Community shopping centers typically range $22-40 per square foot annually. Regional shopping centers range $35-80+ per square foot annually depending on location and co-tenancy. Freestanding buildings range $20-50+ per square foot depending on location and visibility. Urban retail and lifestyle centers command $40-100+ per square foot annually. Premium locations in high-traffic areas can exceed $100 per square foot annually.
Percentage rent typically ranges 5-8% of gross sales exceeding breakpoints, though rates vary by business type and lease structure.
We provide retail leasing services throughout Texas including Houston with diverse retail corridors, suburban centers, and urban retail districts, Dallas-Fort Worth offering extensive retail inventory from neighborhood centers to premier malls, Austin serving growing population with urban and suburban retail options, San Antonio with tourist-oriented retail plus neighborhood and community centers, and other Texas markets with retail opportunities.
Retail leasing involves unique complexities requiring specialized knowledge. We provide comprehensive retail leasing services including site selection based on traffic, demographics, and visibility, market research and competitive analysis, lease negotiation protecting your operating flexibility, percentage rent and co-tenancy negotiation, exclusive use provision negotiation, build-out coordination and landlord allowance maximization, and transaction management through opening.
Our tenant representation services are typically compensated by landlords, providing you professional representation at no direct cost.
Ready to find the perfect retail location for your business? Contact us to discuss your concept, target markets, and requirements. We’ll identify suitable locations, analyze site characteristics, and negotiate lease terms positioning your retail business for success.
Leasing Managers
