Retail investors and landlords tracking tenant performance are navigating a new landscape of metrics that extend well beyond the familiar benchmarks of sales per square foot. In their latest episode of the podcast What’s in Store, CBRE Senior Vice President Karly Iacono and DLC Management Executive Vice President and COO Chris Ressa explored how the retail industry’s key performance indicators are evolving in response to more sophisticated data capabilities and shifting consumer behavior.
Traditional indicators like sales per square foot and foot traffic remain foundational, but Iacono and Ressa emphasized that retailers are now layering on more nuanced, data-driven insights. Ressa explained that one of the more telling metrics is market capture—the extent to which a physical store drives online sales in its trade area. “Retailers can now measure how much their online sales increase when a store opens in a given market,” he said. “They can correlate that increase directly to having a physical presence.” Although methods for attributing those sales vary, often relying on customer data or IP mapping, the principle is clear: a store’s digital halo effect is part of its performance story.
Another emerging measure is visits per square foot. Ressa suggested this could become as central to open-air retail as sales per square foot was to enclosed malls. With nearly universal location-tracking capabilities, visits offer landlords and investors a common denominator to compare performance across different retail categories. Yet the value of a visit depends heavily on the type of retailer. As Iacono noted, a customer who spends two minutes trying on a smartwatch band before purchasing online later represents a meaningful interaction; a brief walkthrough in a clothing store that doesn’t lead to engagement may not. Ressa believes the industry is refining how to interpret these nuances: “Generally, it’s good when traffic is growing and bad when it’s declining,” he said. “Benchmarks are coming, and visits per square foot will become a metric people care about.”
Psychographics—data about why consumers buy—are also shaping retail KPIs in new ways. Moving beyond basic demographics, retailers are using psychographic profiling to understand customer motivations and affinities that drive spending decisions. “It’s not just age or income anymore,” Iacono observed. “It’s about what consumers value most.” Ressa added that advances in loyalty and location data allow retailers to measure those preferences and tailor store experiences or assortments accordingly. For investors evaluating a tenant’s staying power, that means paying attention to which brands are effectively translating psychographic insight into traffic and market share.
Social and digital engagement metrics are further expanding the KPI toolkit. Many retailers now factor social impressions—how much local buzz or online visibility a store generates—into their performance assessments. As Ressa acknowledged, “There’s significant value to retailers with social impressions. They matter to the brand and to how they make decisions,” even if the quantification methods are still maturing.
These shifts point to a broader redefinition of what success looks like in brick-and-mortar retail. Sales remain essential, but they’re now viewed alongside digital activation, customer experience, and cross-channel synergy. The strongest operators will be those who not only sell efficiently but also convert visits into sustained engagement—both in-store and online—and who demonstrate command of the data connecting those patterns.
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