GGP, Simon Property Group and Taubman Centers Among Five Worst Performing REITs Based on Traffic

NEW YORK, July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Thasos Group, an alternative data intelligence firm that transforms location information from mobile phones worldwide into real-time, objective and actionable insights, today published its Q2 2017 Mall REIT Research Report to bring much needed transparency to mall foot traffic. Download the research HERE (www.thasosgroup.com).

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Based on the largest repository of high quality mobile phone location data after Google and Apple, and with little demographic bias, the Thasos platform provides an excellent window of visibility into foot traffic at malls throughout the day, every day, with coverage of nearly 100% of U.S. mall properties. To quantify the accuracy of Thasos data, the Company predicted 1Q17 year-over-year ("YoY") growth in same-store sales and same-store transactions for mall anchors—including Macy's, Nordstrom, Dillard's and Sears—that matched reported numbers to within 0.7% on average.

With accelerating growth in e-commerce and the fate of brick-and-mortar stores being questioned, foot traffic to malls has been the subject of ample speculation in recent months. But accurate foot traffic has remained largely elusive due to the lack of sensors REITs have deployed at their properties to count visitors. Many REITs count visitors for only a small sample of malls—occasionally as few as one mall—and represent such visitor trends as an indication of performance for their malls nation-wide. Thasos, on the other hand, monitors foot traffic at nearly every property for each of the top 30 REITs by market capitalization.

Research Findings Include:

• Most REITs operating malls classified as high-quality Class A by Green Street Advisors have negative YoY foot traffic on a rolling quarterly basis through May 2017.
• The largest and most prestigious mall operators have the greatest quarterly YoY declines in traffic:
• Simon Property Group (SPG) (-5.4%)
• General Growth Partners (GGP) (-5.7%)
• Taubman Centers (TCO) (-6.2%).
  
• High-tech stores such as Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla have no effect in preventing declining traffic.
• Malls with destination restaurants such as Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's underperform by 3.5%.
• Malls with high-end department store anchors such as Nordstrom and Macy's underperform by 3%.
• Malls and strip centers with grocery stores and consumer staples outperform by 5%.

"As our analysis has shown, accurate foot traffic is highly correlated to same-store sales figures," said Greg Skibiski, CEO of Thasos. "It's therefore surprising that most of the industry's largest REITs lack this data, which is valuable not only for forecasting sales but also measuring the effectiveness of promotions, calculating conversion rates and ultimately providing guidance to investors. For the past three years, Thasos has been delivering real-time intelligence across almost every industry on metrics like customer visits, retail deliveries, airline passengers, hospital patients, manufacturing hours worked and more, and now we're pleased to bring much-needed transparency to what has historically been an elusive fundamental REIT metric."

About Thasos Group

Thasos is an alternative data intelligence platform that transforms real-time locations from mobile phones into objective and actionable insights on the performance of businesses, markets, and economies globally. Founded in 2011 at MIT, the firm is commercially successful with close to 25 hedge fund clients and scalable information products that have generated value for the last three years. Thasos' management, investors and advisors are a who's who of data scientists, hedge fund executives and academics, including PDT Co-Founder Ken Nickerson, Acadian Asset Management Founder Gary Bergstrom, former D.E. Shaw Chief Risk Officer Peter Bernard, MIT Media Lab Co-Founder Alex "Sandy" Pentland, and Andrew Lo, Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Thasos occupies a unique position in the alternative data space by aggregating, validating, normalizing and analyzing the largest pool of high-quality mobile phone location data outside of Google and Apple.

For more information on Thasos Group, please visit thasosgroup.com.

Media Contact

Michael Kingsley
Forefront Communications
+1 914-522-9471
michael@forefrontcomms.com

Related Links

http://thasosgroup.com

SOURCE Thasos Group