What Makes a Location "A": Lessons from Inside the Same Shopping Center

People talk about "getting into the right shopping center" like that's the whole game. It's not. I've owned retail stores in centers that were unquestionably A — great anchors, strong overall traffic — and still watched two stores in the same center perform completely differently based on which side of the parking lot they were on.

At Westside One, the center at Sawtelle and Olympic anchored by Marshalls and Michaels, there were two available spaces on either side of the main parking lot exit. Turn one direction and you were walking toward Olympic, with a steady stream of office traffic; turn the other and you were walking away from it. The space toward Olympic cost about $500 more a month in rent. We took the cheaper space, on the quieter side. The store still did well — it was a genuinely good center with strong parking — but looking back, the foot traffic on the Olympic side was probably two to three times higher. That $500 would have been worth it.

We saw the same pattern at the Target and Best Buy center at Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea — the number one Target west of the Mississippi for a stretch of about a decade. We ended up on the La Brea side, by Best Buy and a Starbucks; the other side faced Santa Monica Boulevard. Foot traffic on our side was easily double what it was on the boulevard side, even though both sides technically sat in the same "A" shopping center.

The lesson: being in the right shopping center gets you most of the way there, but the specific spot inside it — which way people naturally walk out of the parking lot, what they pass on their way in, which anchor tenants are pulling foot traffic past your door — can be the difference between a good location and a great one. That's something a broker has to actually study on the ground, not just read off a leasing plan.

Visibility matters too. I'll take a strong corner over most inline spaces almost every time. Inline can work early, when a category is new and less competitive — but as more competitors show up, consumers gravitate toward centers with good parking, visibility, and a mix of other things to do nearby.

Sometimes the ideal A center simply isn't available — a competitor already has a non-compete clause locked in, and there's no getting around it. In that situation, a strong B+ corner with good parking can be a real fallback strategy rather than a downgrade. The move is identifying which corners in the trade area still have that visibility and traffic pattern, and working them, always after confirming with the client that it's the right trade-off before pursuing it.

What I won't do is push a client into an inline space, especially one without parking. I genuinely dislike inline. Without parking to back it up, it starts to feel more like an office than a retail space — people don't stumble onto it, they have to already be looking for you.

Parking isn't always mandatory, either — it depends on the category and the trade area. In dense, walkable, transit-heavy areas, a location with strong foot traffic and no dedicated parking can perform just fine. Ideally you get both: enough walk-by traffic to catch people already out and about, and enough parking to capture people driving in from outside the immediate area. But every category is different. A coffee tenant, a food tenant, a licensed cannabis dispensary, and a retailer serving a specific community all have different traffic patterns and different needs. There's no single formula — it has to be evaluated location by location, category by category.

Evaluating a retail location and want a second opinion on the site itself, not just the shopping center? Contact us.