2023-05-19 06:05:11
12:00 AM
Curiosity invades the passers-by who walk around the Parque Comercial Florida, many of them wonder what they are building on that large piece of land.
This is the second stage of that same shopping center, which opened its doors 10 years ago and bet on an area that did not have an infrastructure that brought together stores, major brands, services and entertainment.
The experiment was more than successful and the first stage was too small. That is why they will make an investment of $400,000 million to expand capacity and receive more visitors.
The managers calculate that during the construction around 1,000 jobs will be enabled and some 1,500 will be generated when it is ready to serve customers. In addition, they anticipate that there will be a direct connection with the 80 Light Metro.
An underestimated sector
“A few years ago, the merchants in the north of Medellín did not believe much and that paradigm was broken in a certain way with Puerta del Norte, which has been around 16 years now,” said Carlos Ramírez, manager of Santa Juana Inmobiliaria, the marketing firm of the Florida.
Looking back, he recalled that the merchants who believed in this project “began to do very well and that’s when interest in the north of Aburrá awoke, to the point where there were always lines and a high flow of requests, the merchants wanted to be there”.
That first experience set the tone and showed that there was a virgin market on the other side of the Metropolitan Area, until then the large and modern shopping centers were crowded in the south of the map.
Ramírez narrated that when he saw the first success story, the study to bring Florida to life more than a decade ago produced something very interesting: “We had a very powerful area of influence, around a million people, because we take everything that is the northwestern and northeastern communes”.
Today, the offer in the northwestern area of Medellín is still low and it is an opportunity that the promoters of the expansion want to take advantage of. The idea, according to what they said, is to anticipate potential competition.
“We are very lonely because 70% of the population of Valle de Aburrá lives on Colombia Street to the north. All of this means that the traffic in the retail park is very good”, emphasized Ramírez.
Additionally, he noted that the proximity to the National University, the ITM and large companies such as Coca-Cola, TCC and Servientrega, not to mention the officials who work in the bunker of the Prosecutor’s Office, increase the mass of visitors every day.
more entertainment
This second stage will have a constructed area of 85,000 square meters and, of those, 7,500 will be for entertainment.
Esteban Montes, project manager, explained that there will be free attractions and others with payment, this being the “anchor” to summon families, that is the trend.
“The dynamics have changed in the last 15 years, before we had the anchor of the shopping centers were warehouses of between 3,000 and 5,000 square meters, but other types of experience began to be demanded more and that accelerated following we left the pandemic,” he said.
“Today —he added— we can say that the biggest anchors that a shopping center can have are oriented towards the entertainment that one offers to the whole family and towards the gastronomic area that is part of that entertainment”.
To this, according to the manager, we must add an area of 28,000 square meters that will be transferred to the Municipality of Medellín, designed for the enjoyment of the community. In this sense, they commented that, to have a dimension of this space, it is enough to say that it is equivalent to five times the El Poblado Park.
Connection with the Subway
Another strength that the project will have, according to the executive managers, will be the direct connection with the future 80 light rail.
Montes explained that the talks between the parties have been going on for a long time and, as the work is currently planned, the railway workshop will be next to the shopping center and the Córdoba station will be located in front, “which will be the one that connects us and that will generate significant traffic and will create a renewal in the area”.
In this regard, Carlos Ramírez mentioned that the indicators reviewed by them reveal that “shopping centers with a connection to the subway reach annual traffic of over 20 million people. Today, there are only four shopping centers with direct connection to the Metro in Valle de Aburrá” (Mayorca, Punto Clave, Bosque Plaza and Puerta del Norte).
The promoters of the project specified that the works for the second stage began in September of last year and they project that the work will be finished by November 2024.
This new infrastructure will house more than 300 commercial premises, which, added to those already existing in the first stage, exceed 500 and total a built area of 152,000 square meters.
On the other hand, those in charge revealed that, even with 18 months to inaugurate the project, its commercialization already exceeds 88% and it already has brands such as Gef, Kalvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Vélez, Tugo and Merkaorgánico.
Finally, they emphasized that the location registered a potential market of $7.3 billion in 2021.
2023 will be hard, but there will be improvement
When asked regarding the current cycle of economic slowdown, in which people stop buying and, therefore, from visiting shopping malls, the project manager, Esteban Montes, highlighted that an investment of $400,000 million is not made thinking regarding the current situation but in the future potential: “Last year was extremely good for merchants, in 2023 there will be a significant slowdown in the economy and it will be a little tougher, but these are cycles that last between 12 and 18 months, In other words, by 2024 we expect the economy to return to a significant growth path.
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