Landlords would rather hold out for higher-paying tenants than lower rent
For most Singaporeans, the mall is where life happens—groceries, dinner, a haircut, the kids’ enrichment class, all under one roof. It’s as much infrastructure as it is retail.
And we are not short of options. According to shopping mall directory SingMalls, there are at least 106 malls across the island—serving a total population of 6.11 million people. That works out to roughly one mall for every 58,000 people, in a country spanning just 700 square kilometres.
But in some once-bustling malls today, the silence is striking: empty shopfronts, boarded-up units, and “Coming Soon” signs left hanging for months.
Singapore’s retail vacancy rate has been rising—hitting 6.8% island-wide in Q1 2025, up from 6.2% the previous quarter, according to Savills Research. Some businesses have cited rising rental costs, yet higher vacancies alone do not seem to be forcing landlords to lower rents.
Aren’t landlords bleeding money by leaving units vacant? The uncomfortable answer, it turns out, is often no—and The Woodleigh Mall is the clearest illustration of why.
Vulcan Post examines what is going on behind the scenes.
An exodus of shops
The Woodleigh Mall soft-launched in May 2023 as the anchor of a brand new estate, meant to be the beating heart of the Bidadari community—the only full-fledged mall serving thousands of residents in the area. \
At its grand opening in Nov 2023, management proudly announced it had achieved 100% occupancy, calling it “a testament to our tenants’ trust in our vision.”
But less than two years later, the picture looks very different.
Residents and workers at The Woodleigh Mall have watched an exodus unfold, particularly in the basement food cluster known as fEAsT@Woodleigh.
According to Mothership, more than 15 shops vacated the mall within the span of a year. Former tenants include Burger King, Fish & Co., Lee Wee Brothers, and Swee Heng Bakery—all gone.
A 45-year-old shop employee who has worked at the mall for about three years told the publication that the high turnover among F&B tenants has been happening “since the start.”
“Since the start, the mall is not doing very well. The footfall is low over here compared to other malls,” she said. “Normally for a new mall, the crowd will slowly build up, but not for this mall. It has been very stagnant,” she added.
Moreover, some residents have cited expensive parking, a confusing layout, and limited retail options as reasons they go elsewhere. “People don’t come here to shop because there’s nothing to shop,” the employee said.
Many fingers have pointed to another key culprit: rent.
Constance Tan, director of bubble tea brand No.17 Tea, told Stomp that when her lease came up for renewal, the landlord quoted a 30% increase in rent, a figure she described as “totally unsustainable.” Rather than leave entirely, No.17 Tea downsized to a smaller kiosk-format unit within the same mall.
Residents’ instinct is to blame greedy landlords, and that isn’t entirely wrong. But it misses how commercial property actually works—and why holding out for for higher-paying tenants can make perfect financial sense.
A mall is valued like a stock, rather than a business
The footfall problem and the rent problem feed into each other in a vicious cycle.
Mall rents are largely determined by foot traffic. A mall pulling in five million visitors a month, for example, can command far higher rents than one drawing 1.5 million. But when footfall disappoints, tenants struggle to generate the sales needed to justify their rent. Some eventually leave, making the mall even less attractive to shoppers—and even harder to lease out.
So why not simply lower rents to fill empty units?
Because for commercial landlords, lower rents do not just mean lower income. They can also reduce the mall’s overall value.
Unlike an HDB flat, which is valued mainly based on nearby transaction prices, commercial properties are typically valued based on the rental income they generate. According to CKS Property Consultants, this is calculated by taking a property’s net operating income—rental revenue minus operating expenses—and dividing it by a market capitalisation rate. In simple terms: the more rent a mall collects, the more valuable it is.
That creates a dilemma for landlords. If they cut rents across the board to attract tenants, the mall’s projected income falls, and so does its valuation.
This matters because banks lend against that valuation. In Singapore, commercial property loans are typically capped at around 75% of a property’s value. So if a mall’s valuation drops by S$50 million after rental cuts, the landlord’s borrowing capacity could shrink by S$37.5 million. That’s real money off the table.
Think about it from the landlord’s perspective.
An empty unit could cost them a few thousand dollars a month in lost rent. Dropping rents across the board to fill the mall could slash its valuation by millions overnight. Holding out isn’t stubbornness, but math.
Who are the higher-paying tenants?
Ironically, the tenants most willing to pay high rents are often tuition centres, clinics, and enrichment studios—businesses with steady income streams that generate little to no shopping footfall.
These tenants are attractive to landlords precisely because they are less dependent on walk-in traffic. A quiet Tuesday afternoon may hurt a restaurant or fashion retailer, but a tuition centre still collects its fees. They pay reliably, sign longer leases, and offer stable income streams, making them ideal tenants on paper, even if they gradually hollow out the mall’s retail atmosphere.
Healthcare and enrichment tenants have been part of The Woodleigh Mall’s mix since its soft launch—sitting alongside the F&B brands that were publicly celebrated. As those F&B tenants have left, the balance has shifted, and the education and medical presence has become increasingly prominent. One in four units at The Woodleigh Mall is now an enrichment centre or medical clinic.
On paper, occupancy still looks healthy because these units count as filled space. But to residents hoping to grab dinner, shop, or run errands, the mall can feel less like a vibrant retail hub and more like a ghost town, one where “everything is so expensive.”
On the other end of the spectrum, landlords are also holding out for deep-pocketed foreign brands, particularly the wave of Chinese F&B chains currently expanding aggressively into Singapore.
As of Aug 2025, some 85 Chinese F&B brands were operating around 405 outlets in Singapore, more than double the 32 brands recorded just a year earlier. Many of these brands have reportedly offered higher rental bids to secure prime retail spots—precisely the kind of tenant a landlord waiting for a premium offer is hoping to attract.
As unfair as it sounds, there’s no mechanism in Singapore that forces landlords to fill units with retail tenants, or to fill them at all.
There is no vacancy tax on commercial retail space, nor any penalty for keeping units empty for extended periods while waiting for a better tenant. There is also no requirement that a mall serving a residential estate must maintain a minimum standard of retail or F&B options.
The Woodleigh Mall’s joint venture owners—Cuscaden Peak Investments and Kajima Development—even put the mall up for sale for an asking price of S$800 million in July 2024, less than a year after its grand opening. That’s likely not the behaviour of owners optimising for the community, but for exit.
What does this mean for residents?
The frustration residents feel at Woodleigh is real and legitimate. When you’re one of thousands of HDB residents with a single mall serving your estate, it matters what’s in it.
But the problem isn’t simply that landlords are greedy. It’s the entire valuation and financing system for commercial property that creates rational incentives to prioritise rent income over community function. A landlord who drops rent to fill their mall with popular F&B tenants may literally be destroying value on paper by doing so.
Until there’s a policy lever that changes those incentives, whether that’s a vacancy tax, use requirements for community-serving malls, or something else entirely, the cycle is likely to continue.
So the next time you walk past a shuttered unit in your neighbourhood mall, remember: it might not be sitting empty because nobody wants it. It might be sitting empty because the landlord is waiting for a tenant who makes better financial sense.
And right now, nothing is stopping them.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
Featured Image Credit: The Woodleigh Mall, ConsiderationNo1619 via Reddit
