Malls bet on parking space leases to draw shoppers

TIMOTHY LEWANIKA | Monday January 26, 2026 06:00

Gaborone’s largest shopping centres by Gross Lettable Area (GLA), which include Game City, The Fields, and Airport Junction, have leased out large chunks of their parking spaces to diversify service offerings and to enhance their competitiveness in the war for foot traffic.

By introducing food, sport, and leisure offerings at ground level, mall owners are hoping to increase time spent at their malls and translate higher visitor numbers into stronger sales for existing tenants.

Explaining this trend to BusinessWeek, Time Projects Managing Director, Turnie Morolong, said the trend was part of a larger strategy to revive foot traffic in shopping centres and increase competitiveness in product offerings by property owners.

“It’s a play to gain more foot traffic to malls,” he said. “If someone comes to the mall to play tennis and then they get coffee after that from a coffee shop in the mall, it means they spend more time in the mall. “They spend more money, and this means increased revenue for tenants.”

Time Projects has retail malls in Letlhakane, Francistown, and Gaborone, and according to Morolong, the trend in leased parking spaces will continue increasing as more and more shopping centres sprout up.

In commercial real estate terms, shopping centres are valued not only on GLA but on the quality and sustainability of cash flows generated across the asset. As retail spending patterns shift and tenant turnover becomes more sensitive to foot traffic, landlords are increasingly focused on optimising underutilised space and strengthening non-traditional income streams.

Parking areas, which typically generate no direct yield but carry high land value, are now being repurposed into revenue-producing uses that improve overall asset performance.

Despite the trend, the latest Financial Stability Council report showed that commercial real estate as an asset class has been experiencing relatively muted credit supply from commercial banks due to overcrowding risks associated with the Gaborone area. This has forced retail owners to be creative about increasing the value of their assets whilst also opening new pockets of revenue on the existing assets.

Quizzed on the trend of increasing numbers of neighbourhood centres or community malls in areas on the periphery of Gaborone, Morolong explained that this was a response to strong demand in those areas, particularly in Mogoditshane.

His read into the many developments happening in that area was that locations like Mogoditshane were consistently enjoying high economic activity driven by strong population presence, something which has attracted mall developers to flock to the area with developments that anchor on one or two anchor tenants and a few small shops to get foot traffic.

“One of the areas experiencing increased retail activity on the real estate side is Mogoditshane, and the reason for that is its high economic activity and dense population, which is an incentive for developers to meet that demand,” he said.