It’s been a tough decade for mall owners: First there was the so-called retail apocalypse, then the pandemic, then the tide of rising interest rates.
Stephen Lebovitz, the CEO of CBL & Associates Properties, led the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based mall REIT through it all, including a bankruptcy in 2020. He remembers taking calls from panicked CEOs who couldn’t open stores and paying his company’s bills.
“They couldn’t generate revenue. We still had debt payments. We still had real estate taxes. We had utilities,” Lebovitz said in an interview at the National Association of Real Estate Editors conference in New Orleans last month. “So that was…