Property

How about hosting your event in an Antwerp icon? The Stadsfeestzaal, a shopping centre located on the city's main shopping street Meir, welcomes more than 100 guests in style and with all the necessary precautions against Covid-19. What better place to organise your event than an impressive retail monument?

Three supermarket chains (Carrefour Market, Colruyt and Aldi) top the list of 100 largest Belgian store chains in terms of retail space. Shoe chain Bristol is rising fast, as are Lapperre, Oh'Green and Maxi Toys. In terms of number of stores, the banks are still in the lead.

JD.com has its eye on the port of Zeebrugge as a springboard to Europe. The Chinese e-commerce player, which mainly focuses on logistics, visited the port together with Flemish prime minister Jan Jambon.

The former Mexx store in Mons, Belgium is for rent again after a year-long renovation, but the price is set at 30,000?euros per month - twice the local average. It is a textbook example of how real estate logic sometimes clashes with retail and other interests.

Over the past ten years, the number of shops in Flanders and Brussels has decreased by 15?%. Strangely, the vacancy rate increased, but so too did the amount of retail space that was actually used. E-commerce is often presented as the culprit, but the story is actually much more complex than that.

Swedish fashion chain H&M is on a mission to demand contracts with variable rents, which can go up or down depending on the store's turnover. However, the chain wants to deduct returns in that store, angering real estate owners.

German internet company?Zalando?is about to build a new mega-distribution?centre in Bleiswijk in the Netherlands. The project?will yield 1500 jobs and involves an investment of 200 million euros.