On the evening of November 5, Simon Property, the world’s largest retail property owner and operator, reported its results for the third quarter and the first nine months of 2026. CEO Eli Simon’s main message rang out clear as a bell: tenant demand for mall space, or at least for Simon’s mall space, is very strong.
A couple of days earlier, on the Tuesday, a massive political earthquake had shaken the country, and on Wednesday and Thursday the stock markets had gyrated giddily. The mainstream media was having a feeding frenzy and social media was buzzing with even more gloat and vitriol than usual. You absolutely wouldn’t know any of that listening to company CEO Eli Simon and his CFO Brian McDade. In the midst of chaos they were, as mall owners have historically been famous for, stone walls of calm, continuity and self-confidence. In a news cycle of perpetual negativity, it was a breath of fresh air: you could kick back and tell yourself that the world wasn’t nearly in as bad a shape as we were being told.
A core theme from Simon’s leadership was occupancy and the strength of the tenant pipeline: put simply, retailers are still expanding in physical space. 5 per cent in the third quarter, leaving not a lot of potential upside. Eli Simon: “Our job is to continue to re-merchandise these centres, and that’s not a [case of] we get to 100 per cent, and then we stop. Our foot is on the gas always.
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