Despite the persistently challenging macroeconomic conditions, the German retail sector is proving resilient, but is still undergoing far-reaching structural change. This is the conclusion of the retail section of the ZIA Spring Report on the Real Estate Industry 2026, which was prepared by BBE Handelsberatung together with the IPH Group.
“The structural change in the retail sector continues, but at the same time opens up new opportunities for sustainable properties that react flexibly to changing consumption and usage requirements. Brick-and-mortar retail remains extremely important for cities, as it is the trigger for many people to visit the city centre,” says Joachim Stumpf, Managing Director of BBE Holding and the IPH Group.
The study shows an increasing spread in market development. This is particularly evident in food compared to non-food products. While the food segment recorded a 44.8 percent increase in sales in the period from 2010 to 2025, non-food sales fell by 8.6 percent in the same period. Among the winners are discounters, who benefit from the increased price sensitivity of many consumers. At the same time, brand manufacturers are also pushing ahead with their expansion and are increasingly setting up their own store formats in order to reach their customers directly. Large space operators are increasingly supplementing their strategies with smaller city formats. Another impetus for expansion comes from health and beauty concepts, which are increasingly pushing into highly frequented shopping locations. However, the most stable pillar of stationary retail remains local supply – i.e. food and drugstore products.
The losers, on the other hand, include the medium-sized non-food retailers, which are suffering massively from staff shortages, unresolved succession plans and the growing competitive pressure from online retailing. Especially in the case of inner-city assortments such as textiles, shoes and sports, it can be observed that the stationary share of sales has now fallen below the 50 percent mark in many cases.
The winning locations of the growing formats in metropolitan areas and shopping centers with a supra-regional impact are not identical with the losing locations of the shrinking formats, mainly in small and medium-sized towns. This increases the polarization between strong and weak macro and micro locations. At the macro level, this means that cities with a high degree of centrality, strong economic power, tourist attractiveness, a large catchment area and, ideally, an attractive urban development centre are much more resilient. At the micro level, on the other hand, 1A locations are condensing into smaller and smaller core areas, while a complete loss of retail use can often be observed at the peripheral locations.
Retail-Plus: Substitution of trade by other uses
A key finding of the report is the increasing importance of Retail-Plus concepts. Through a target group-specific expansion of usage clusters, it is possible to work out a clear additional benefit. The aim is to create new incentives to visit and strengthen existing ones, to increase the length of stay and to stabilise the frequency in the long term. This requires the integration of complementary uses such as gastronomy, health & wellness, leisure activities, services and experience-oriented formats that offer added value beyond pure shopping and position the location as a multifunctional destination. Different uses offer different advantages and disadvantages in terms of frequency, rent valuation, rent default risk, social added value, identity-creating significance and anchor function. “The decisive factor is the correct combination of the different uses, which can vary greatly depending on the location, property and composition of previous customer flows,” explains Stumpf. For example, uses such as restaurants or doctors’ surgeries create a frequency that is ideally superior to the non-food trade, while residential uses significantly reduce the frequency. Some leisure uses can only generate a low rent burden, while serviced apartments, for example, achieve high rents. Museums and event spaces can create identity-creating significance, but only generate low rents. “Ideally, the developer succeeds in combining different uses advantageously so that a high value of the property is secured in the long term,” says Stumpf.
