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Vicinity Centres
Vicinity Centres owns and manages Australian shopping centres, collecting rent from retail tenants and fees for managing the properties.
Vicinity Centres is one of Australia's biggest shopping centre owners. It owns and runs malls across the country — the places where people go to buy clothes, grab lunch, see a movie, or get their hair cut. Its portfolio includes household names like Chadstone in Melbourne, one of the largest shopping centres in the Southern Hemisphere, along with dozens of other centres in cities and suburbs.
The business model is simple to understand. Vicinity owns the buildings and land, signs up retailers as tenants, and collects rent from them. Shoppers don't pay Vicinity directly — the retailers do, because the mall brings them foot traffic they could never generate on their own. Vicinity also earns management fees for running centres, including some it manages on behalf of other owners. It was formerly called Federation Centres and took the Vicinity name after merging with Novion Property Group in 2015. Shopping centre landlords live and die by foot traffic. When customers show up, retailers sell more, and they can afford to pay higher rents. But when shoppers drift to online stores or rival malls, tenants struggle, and landlords have to offer rent relief or watch stores close. This has made the business lumpy. The pandemic hit hard: lockdowns emptied malls, some tenants stopped paying rent, and property values fell. More recently, rising interest rates have made borrowing more expensive for a company that carries a large pile of debt.
Vicinity's big bet is that well-located, well-managed malls are still valuable meeting places, not just shopping venues. It has been redeveloping centres to add apartments, offices, and dining, trying to make them places people visit for reasons beyond buying things. Its closest rival is Scentre Group, which owns the Westfield malls in Australia and New Zealand. A key question for the company is whether it can keep its malls full and its rents climbing while online shopping keeps growing — because its whole business rests on that idea.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026