Ayala Land earmarks P13B for renovation of four malls

MANILA,  Philippines  —Property giant Ayala Land Inc. is spending P13 billion to renovate and reinvent four of its premier shopping centers into “iconic” destinations amid increasing competition in the retail sector.

The redevelopment will take two years to complete and will involve the builder’s TriNoma shopping center in Quezon City, the Glorietta and Greenbelt malls in Makati City and Ayala Center Cebu. It enlisted the help of global design firms such as Australia’s Buchan and CAN Design Ltd. of Hong Kong for the project.

“This is the first time in our history that we will embark on renovating least four of our major flagship malls at once,” Mariana Zobel de Ayala, senior vice president and head of leasing and hospitality at Ayala Land, said during a media briefing on Thursday.

READ: Greenbelt, Glorietta, 2 other flagship malls up for renovation

Zobel, also the head of Ayala Malls, said they will tear down the three-decade old Greenbelt 1 and build a new shopping center that will open by 2028.

She said the investment in the new mall has yet to be finalized but that amount will come on top of the P13 billion renovation budget.

The new Greenbelt 1 will have four levels of retail space and underground parking, said AC Legarda, vice president of Ayala Malls and area head for Greenbelt.

“We’re really positioning to develop our malls to their full potential,” Zobel said, adding that the redevelopment will increase their combined total gross leasable area of 400,000 square meters by about 10 percent.

Ayala Land is also expanding its management team with international expertise as it hired British national Paul Andrew Birkett as chief operations officer of AyalaLand Malls.

Tough competition in retail sector

With years of experience working for commercial developers in Dubai and the United Kingdom, Birkett said one of their goals is to differentiate Ayala Land’s mall projects while ensuring they remain relevant to their customer base.

“We’ve become a bit vanilla. We were neither one thing nor the other,” he said during the briefing.

“We want to have a familiarity of the core but each mall has to be unique,” he added.

Ayala Land, one of the country’s biggest developers, is facing stiff competition from rivals such as Sy-led SM Prime Holdings, which earlier announced plans to deploy as much as P100 billion in capital spending for 2024.

Birkett said Ayala Land also wants to maximize the use of open spaces to improve the experience of mall-goers.

READ: New Ayala Land CEO hinges profit ambition on mall expansion plan

“We’re trying to create something iconic with the landscape as well,” he said.

“The development team is currently looking at creating an entire Palawan Cherry Blossom orchard garden [in Glorietta] so we can have beautiful cherry blossoms like you see in Japan,” he said.

The renovations will start in 2024 with TriNoma the first to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2025. Improvements at Glorietta, Greenbelt 2, and Ayala Center Cebu will be finished by 2026, according to the developer.

New Glorietta Mall corner facade perspective from Ayala Land