Iconic shopping mall in South Africa’s capital city that is shrinking and losing stores

Brooklyn Mall in Pretoria has seen its gross lettable area (GLA) expand over the past decade, except in 2025, while its vacancy rate has worsened from 5% in 2020 to 16.8% in 2025.

While there has been some recovery in the mall’s performance between 2024 and 2025, Brooklyn Mall’s vacancies, gross rental, and valuation have yet to return to levels seen five or ten years ago.

Brooklyn Mall is nestled in an affluent suburb of Pretoria’s cosmopolitan area. It offers shoppers a full complement of national fashion retailers, specialist boutiques, restaurants, coffee bars, and home and décor shops. 

The mall is anchored by a Woolworths, Checkers, Dis-Chem, Clicks, and Ster-Kinekor.

Brooklyn Mall is majority owned by South Africa’s largest real estate investment trust (REIT), Growthpoint Properties, which holds a 75% stake. The remaining 25% is held by Atterbury’s Abacus Property Holdings.

In Growthpoint’s financial statements, Brooklyn Mall’s performance is reported alongside the performance of Brooklyn Square.

The two are physically connected and operate as one large shopping complex in Brooklyn, Pretoria. The square serves as an adjoining open-air dining and lifestyle courtyard.

Analysing Growthpoint’s annual financial statements between 2015 and 2025, there are clear signs of strain at its Brooklyn Mall asset.

The mall’s physical reconfiguration has also changed over the 10-year period, growing from 55,935 m² in 2015 to a peak of 56,439 m² in 2023.

Since then, the mall’s GLA has remained relatively stable, until 2025, when it shrunk significantly to 55,370 m², smaller than it was ten years ago.

Over that same period, the mall’s vacancy rate has worsened significantly, going from 5.3% in 2015 to its worst level of 18.7% in 2024.

In the pre-pandemic era, vacancies were tightly controlled, hovering between 4% and 6% before hitting a decade-low of 3.6% in 2019.

However, post-pandemic, the mall has struggled to recover, with vacancies rising from 5% in 2020 to 8.7% in 2022.

In the years that followed, vacancies at Brooklyn Mall continued to climb, peaking at 18.7% in 2024 before beginning to recover to 16.8% in 2025.

To manage this pressure, Brooklyn Mall’s monthly gross rentals were cut from R313.34 per m² in 2020 to R279.78 per m² in 2025.

This is only slightly more than the R262 per m² the mall earned a decade ago, in 2015.

The plan to turn Brooklyn Mall around

In its 2025 investor presentation, Growthpoint noted that vacancies continue to trouble Brooklyn Mall, with the mall particularly hard hit due to the closure of a Game store.

The company said this added to the existing stubborn vacancies at the office and Cinema Nouveau, although it noted that vacancies at Brooklyn Mall fell from 18.7% in 2024 to 16.8% in 2025.

While Growthpoint stopped disclosing the mall’s valuation in 2023, the negative impact of its high vacancy rates and slow gross rental growth is evident in prior years.

In 2015, Growthpoint’s 75% stake in Brooklyn Mall was valued at R2.08 billion. Its valuation peaked in 2016 at R2.26 billion, but by 2022, Growthpoint’s stake was valued at R1.66 billion.

To address this decline, Growthpoint said in its Annual Report for the 2025 financial year that all of the centres in its long-term hold portfolio have undergone extensive redevelopment and upgrades.

It specifically noted that Brooklyn Mall’s redevelopment and upgrades are currently in the planning phase.

While no other details have been shared, the company said in its latest interim results for the first half of 2026 that it has approved development costs of R73.4 million for Brooklyn Mall.

The estimated completion date for these developments is April 2027.

In the meantime, one reform Growthpoint has implemented at Brooklyn Mall is the addition of ticketless admyt parking systems.

The REIT said the installation of these systems should support improved access, circulation, and data collection.

The significant decrease in the mall’s GLA from 2024 to 2025 – which saw it shrink from 56,418 to 55,370 m² – may also indicate that the asset is undergoing major changes.