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RioCan reported new leasing spreads of 37.3% in FY2025. A record. 98.5% retail committed occupancy. 93.1% tenant retention ratio. Their Q2 2025 investor presentation described the outcome plainly: "All ten retail units vacated in Q1 2024 were backfilled by stronger, more resilient tenants" (RioCan Full Year 2025 Results, February 2026).
That's not a leasing story. It's a data story. And the gap between how most properties make tenant mix decisions and how RioCan is making them is widening every year.
Why Tenant Mix Is the Most Consequential Decision a Property Makes
ICSC's research is unambiguous: the mix of goods and services in a commercial shopping district is one of the most significant drivers of customer visitation. Three independent peer-reviewed studies across the UK, the Netherlands, and India corroborate it at the property level: retail rents are statistically higher in properties with a larger, better-balanced tenant mix, and any departure from tenant mix equilibrium reduces total retail rents (Xu, Yiu and Cheung, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 2022; Zhang, van Duijn and van der Vlist, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 2023; Ramalakshmi and Venkatesh, Advances in Consumer Research, 2025).
Macerich CEO Jackson Hsieh made the financial translation explicit on the CBRE Weekly Take podcast in April 2026. The company's effort to upgrade approximately 1,000 tenant spaces, roughly 25% of its entire portfolio, was projected to generate $140 million in incremental revenue. "About 80% of that flows into NOI," Hsieh said, approximately $112 million in incremental NOI from tenant mix repositioning. He was equally direct about the threshold: "There's no vibrancy if you're at 83% occupancy. There's no price tension."
Canadian retail valuations rose 4.08% year over year in Q1 2025, outperforming every other major Canadian property sector: residential at 1.13%, industrial at 0.40%, and office at negative 4.02% (Altus Group, May 2025). Altus Group's Senior Director of Retail Practice was direct about why: "The impact depends on the type of retailer and the composition of the tenant mix within shopping centres."
How Most Leasing Decisions Still Get Made
ICSC's own primary guide on tenant mix acknowledges that retail is a relationship-based industry where "deals are often made based on previous deals and track records," and that final decisions rely on "intuition, experience, and a history of positive results" (ICSC, Improving Tenant Mix: A Guide, 2014). CBRE has been equally candid: "Investment decisions relied heavily on broker relationships, gut feelings, and limited comparable property data."
At an ICSC Las Vegas 2025 professional development workshop, Avison Young's Director of Retail Market Intelligence described the gap precisely: "We're drowning in data, but we're sort of starved for that wisdom piece: how do you add that value? How do you make it meaningful to operate a property, to lease, to manage, to market, to sell, to acquire?" (ICSC Exchange, May 2025).
The analytics maturity data confirms this is structural, not anecdotal. Only 18 to 47% of CRE firms report measurable ROI from data-driven applications, versus a cross-industry mean of 44.4%. CRE AI adoption ranks in the lowest tier globally, with 3 to 19% reporting monetized AI applications (Innovation Vista, Analytics Maturity in CRE: 2026 Mid-market Survey, 2026).
What AI Actually Does for Tenant Mix
The tools now available to leasing teams move from relationship-based judgment toward evidence-based decision-making without replacing the expertise that closes deals.
Placer.ai's Void Analysis platform is the most widely adopted location intelligence tool in the sector. It ingests anonymized mobile device data from tens of millions of devices to produce visit counts, dwell time, and trade area origin data at the property level. Its Void Analysis function layers on cross-shopping journey data, demographic and psychographic overlays, and chain expansion and contraction momentum signals to generate a Relative Fit Score for candidate tenants: a data-driven assessment of how well a given tenant would perform in a given space given the existing mix and the surrounding trade area. In March 2026, Green Street, the leading REIT research firm, integrated Placer.ai's foot traffic data directly into its U.S. platform. Green Street's Chief Analytics Officer stated: "Understanding granular, site-level footfall is critical to making confident real estate decisions" (Green Street press release, March 2026).
Brixmor Property Group is using AI for all of these. Their lease negotiation timelines are approximately 15% shorter over two years as a result (ICSC, citing CoStar, June 2026). Savills reports that across its managed shopping centres, early AI deployments are "focused on forecasting tenant performance, identifying emerging covenant risk, analysing leases and optimising portfolios" (Savills, May 2026).
The Canadian Example Worth Knowing
Oxford Properties manages seven Canadian shopping centres. Their Director of Data, Analytics and Research, Manil Wagle, described their approach in a published 2025 interview: "We use customer demographics, foot traffic patterns, and sales productivity to guide tenant mix, leasing strategies, and marketing decisions. For every mall corridor, Oxford understands traffic flows, building retail analytics data, helping to determine rent premiums based on traffic volume."
Wagle confirmed Oxford has completed over a dozen joint projects where retailers shared full sales and traffic data, and that the team has been using regression, forecasting, simulations, and clustering models for over a decade, now layering in advanced AI built in-house to automate reporting and accelerate decision making. Oxford's seven Canadian malls report 82.5 million visits, back to pre-pandemic levels (Kinexio/Oxford Properties, April 2025).
That's the standard the best-resourced Canadian operator is operating at. The tools to approach it are now accessible to properties without Oxford's data science team.
The Category Decisions That Matter Right Now
ICSC's June 2026 coverage of where AI is proving its value for retail landlords documents live applications across named operators: tenant health analysis to detect early warning signs of financially distressed tenants before they default, tenant prospecting to surface candidate tenants for vacant spaces matched against demographic and market data, advanced video analytics measuring store visits, customer compositions, and dwell time by zone, and shopper behaviour analysis connecting event attendance and customer feedback to leasing strategy (ICSC Exchange, June 2026).
JLL Canada's April 2026 market analysis is direct about the structural shift: Canada is operating a permanent "barbell retail model, where value and premium segments thrive while the middle hollows out." Dining, entertainment, and fitness and wellness encompassed more than half of Canada's Q1 2025 new store announcements (JLL Canada, June 2025). Food and beverage retail sales rose 5.6% year over year in Canada through November 2025 (Statistics Canada, February 2026). ICSC confirmed in July 2026 that the share of GLA in shopping centres devoted to retail continues to decline and shift toward food and beverage in 2026 versus the same period in 2025.
CBRE's survey of 50-plus retailers, landlords, and investors at ICSC Las Vegas 2025 found health and wellness and fitness leading tenant category momentum at 45% of respondents. JLL's 2026 Entertainment Report identifies approximately 16.5 million square feet of location-based entertainment concepts planned across the U.S. and Canada.
The properties that read those signals and position their tenant mix accordingly before vacancy forces the decision will set their own terms. The ones that wait until a lease expires will compete for the same tenants in a tighter market.
ICSC and McKinsey's April 2026 joint research put the stakes plainly: the top decile of retail operators will capture more than 85% of sector economic profit (ICSC and McKinsey, April 2026). Tenant mix is the primary variable separating that decile from everyone else.
Interested in what a data-driven tenant mix strategy could look like at your property? Book a meeting
