Consumers Don’t Travel to Shop

Scott Burns is an EVP at JLL.

LOS ANGELES—Los Angeles consumers may not be traveling very far to shop. JLL recently tracked the retail spending in Los Angeles submarkets, and found that Venice—surprisingly—topped the list for retail spending, beating out Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, while Downtown and Koreatown fell to the bottom of the list. The chart, however, also revealed that areas with greater accessibility to other submarkets had higher retail spending than those that didn’t.

If you are along the 405 Freeway, you would rather stay along the 405 corridor, or you would rather go east. As you get closer to the coast, the traffic and congestion is tight. The shopping is also different at the coast than Century City, where you have a big mall or where there is a master cluster of promotional fashion. You aren’t going to Venice for those,” Scott Burns, EVP at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. “Venice is a market that people go to spend time, but if you are a larger format retail store, where you have to drive the business that comes, this is not one of those cities where people come just to go shopping.”