DALLAS — With all due respect to junior anchors, small-shop merchandisers and other inline tenants, it’s the users with the single biggest and smallest physical footprints that are fueling much of the growth within Dallas-Fort Worth’s (DFW) retail development landscape. Anchors — specifically grocers — and pad users —particularly national companies — are the elements of new shopping center development that perhaps deserve outsized shares of credit in making new projects pencil. And at the annual InterFace DFW & North Texas Retail & Mixed-Use conference that took place on Sept. 15 at the Hilton Park Cities hotel, separate panels — one of actual owners and the other of brokers — spoke to this trend within the local development market. It’s a narrative that’s fairly easily understood. Grocers represent inelastic consumer demand; pad users represent credit tenancy. Developing new centers without both of those elements is risky. Retail investors have and always will love grocery-anchored retail deals, which are bolstered by the metroplex’s steady population growth. And in these times of high construction costs and rising interest rates, developers have gained extra appreciation for pad sites as pieces of lucrative projects that can be split off and sold or developed as …
