ESSENTIAL TERMS

The Property Council of Australia licences a national dataset on shopping centres, and the language used is common to the industry, from the Property Council of Australia to annual reports and websites discussing particular shopping centres.

Following are some terms that are essential for you to know when considering taking on a franchise in a shopping centre.

• GLAR: gross leasable area retail

• MAT: moving annual turnover

• pedestrian count

• shopping centre type

GLAR

The gross leasable area retail of a shopping centre is its retail size – in square metres. There is a formula that the owners are supposed to follow on how to measure the GLAR, and we can only assume it is consistent. Chadstone, in Melbourne, is an example of a very large shopping centre; it has a GLAR of 186,278 square metres and a total centre area of 233,243 square metres. By comparison, Stocklands at Shellharbour, NSW, is GLAR 59,905 square metres and total centre area of 72,885 square metres.

MAT

This is the sum of the dollar turnover as supplied by the tenants to the owners under their lease conditions. These figures are then added together and declared to the Property Council as the MAT for that shopping centre. In our example, Chadstone has a MAT of $2.301 billion, and Shellharbour $471 million.

Pedestrian count

We have all heard of door counters and how shopping centres measure their pedestrians – pedestrian count is the total number of visitors per year. Chadstone’s pedestrian count is 24,200,000 and Shellharbour’s is 8,182,769.

Shopping centre type

Shopping centres are defined primarily by the size of their retail space (GLAR) and are broken up into the following categories: