Leading Question

>>Plenty, say retail experts with insight into our region.

The Southwest Florida region has been under-retailed for a long time, says Robert Gibbs of the Birmingham, Mich.-based Gibbs Planning Group, an urban-planning and retail firm.

"I know that nationally the retailers I work with always felt you were underserved and you just needed a little more growth-which you've gotten-to absorb it," he says.

Derek Noce, director of Retail Intelligence Group, a Tampa-based investment advisory firm specializing in the retail industry, adds, "Now retail is just catching up to the population growth. I think there's still more retail growth to come, actually."

Although to residents it probably appears to be a glut of retail, with the opening of Gulf Coast Town Center and Coconut Point and the changes at Edison Mall, Coastland Center and Waterside Shops bringing new stores, Gibbs doesn't see it that way.

"A few years ago you had just really average quality. You either had really great fine shops or just a lot of tourist T-shirt type shops," he says. "Today you're really getting the solid mid- to mid-upper market. You're really more representative of what the rest of the country has now in terms of shopping."

He recalls doing a study for the city of Naples about 12 years ago, before the revitalization of Fifth Avenue, "when everybody thought it was saturated then."

"The market was dormant then," he says. "It will now be close to an equilibrium of supply and demand. Probably these centers will take three to five years to fully absorb the market. Then after that, there's room for more growth."

That could include another new regional mall in five to 10 years and the redevelopment of older shopping centers into higher-density mixed-use projects.

Still needed: more small- to medium-sized restaurants, sub-luxury department stores such as Nordstrom, says Noce, and more stores, like Bass Pro Shop, that cater to outdoor pursuits, such as Dick's Sporting Goods and Zumiez, which sells sports-related apparel, equipment and accessories. Noce, who lives in Cape Coral, also points out that the city has the only area Kohl's, which is seeking to add more stores in Southwest Florida.

In Cape Coral alone, Noce points out that there's only one Wal-Mart Supercenter and a real scarcity of bookstores or electronics stores. "Cape Coral still is under-stored," he says. "There's a lot of untapped demand in Cape Coral for people that don't want to drive to the new malls [about 40 minutes away]."

Southwest Florida has a combination of growth, wealth and tourism dollars that appeal to retailers. The national average in America is about 20 square feet of retail per person, Gibbs says, but because of the tourism factor, Southwest Florida probably needs about 30 square feet per person.

The tourism factor "was always given too much weight as being a negative," Gibb says. "People say [it's] completely dead for a quarter a year, but every market has a slow quarter."

Older centers can expect an initial drop of up to 20 percent in sales, but after the novelty of the new malls wears off, they'll rebound, Gibbs says. To compete, smaller or independent retailers need to improve their business practices, such as keeping longer hours, providing better service and offering a wider range of sizes or colors.

-Lori Johnston