Last updated : March 20, 2026 3:32 pm
Leasing conversations in retail used to start with a brand deck. Now they start with a demographic heat map. Catchment economics has become the real anchor tenant, says Mitul Jain, Managing Director of SPJ Group.
Retail leasing conversations in Delhi NCR have shifted in tone over the last few years. Across India’s top cities, retail leasing activity has recovered sharply after the pandemic slowdown. Data from CBRE India shows that gross retail leasing across the country’s major cities exceeded roughly 6.4 million square feet in 2024, with Delhi NCR region accounting for one of the largest shares of that activity.
Footfall reliability matters more than the novelty of the project. Brands increasingly evaluate residential absorption, office density and traffic patterns before committing to space. It is not unusual today for leasing negotiations to begin with a demographic heat map rather than a brand deck. In that sense, catchment economics has become the real anchor tenant.
Delhi NCR, after all, already has one of the largest organised retail inventories in the country. According to JLL India, the region accounts for over one-third of India’s total mall stock across the top seven cities. Yet the performance of these assets varies dramatically across micro-markets, sometimes within the same city.
Gurgaon offers a useful contrast.
New Gurgaon, with its broad roads and freshly built residential towers, often appears like the natural habitat for organised retail. The housing inventory is modern, the skyline newer, and the master planning neater. But retail performance there has often moved in uneven cycles. The catchment is still stabilising; residential occupancy is catching up with supply; daily consumption rhythms are not yet fully settled.
Old Gurgaon behaves differently.
The area may not project the same visual polish, but the economic density is hard to miss. The residential clusters are mature. Trading communities have been active here for decades. Office activity, logistics networks, and local commerce overlap in a way that produces a constant baseline of economic movement. The streets feel busy not because of design but because of habit.
Which partly explains why neighbourhood malls, the kind that would once have been dismissed as secondary retail, are quietly regaining importance.
The logic is straightforward. Residential density ensures predictable footfall. Office clusters create weekday consumption. Transit connectivity extends the catchment just enough to support discretionary spending. When these factors converge, the retail mix begins to stabilise.
Food and beverage brands have been particularly central to this shift. According to Knight Frank India’s retail market assessment, F&B accounted for close to 20–25% of leasing activity in several major malls across NCR in recent years. Dining is experiential in a way that e-commerce cannot replicate. But it is also because restaurants function as traffic generators; they lengthen dwell time and pull evening footfall that purely transactional retail rarely achieves.
Mixed-use developments reinforce that behaviour. When residential, office, and retail assets are integrated into a single ecosystem, footfall becomes less volatile. The retail component stops depending entirely on weekend surges and begins benefiting from weekday consumption cycles as well.
Infrastructure has amplified this pattern. The expansion of the Delhi Metro network and the strengthening of arterial corridors such as NH-48 have reshaped mobility patterns across Gurgaon. Old Gurgaon fits that description almost too neatly, which perhaps explains why its organised retail potential has remained somewhat under-discussed. The area has long functioned as a nucleus of economic activity in the city, supported by established residential neighbourhoods and long-standing commercial communities. Consumption patterns there are not speculative; they are embedded in the daily life of the area.
Mitul Jain is the Managing Director of SPJ Group, where he plays a pivotal role in driving the company’s strategic growth, innovation, and operational excellence. With a strong academic background, including an LLM from King’s College London, he brings a blend of legal expertise and business acumen to the real estate sector. Under his leadership, SPJ Group has focused on integrating technology, enhancing transparency, and delivering customer-centric developments, particularly through its real estate vertical, SPJ True Realtyy. Known for his forward-looking approach, Mitul Jain emphasizes sustainable development, evolving market trends, and creating value-driven projects that align with modern urban demands.