By Esther Fung | The Wall Street Journal
Internet retailing is eating into mall revenue, but competition from newer shopping centers was the most common cause of death for malls over the past decade, according to a study of 72 such properties.
While the situations were different, the dead malls generally struggled to compete with newer malls that offered more modern features and a broader selection of stores, according to Wells Fargo Securities, whose database covers about 1,000 malls.
The dead malls were built in the mid-1970s and were overtaken by larger malls built from the late 1970s to the early 1990s that better capitalized on demographic and transportation shifts.
