Many have been asking me on how to find a good location in Kuwait or a store in one of the new malls around. The answer is a very tiring procedure and sometimes may take up to one year of searching but this all depends on your budget, if your budget was an open one then you can always find a store in a couple of days and whatever location you choose, but when constrained with a certain budget patience is the answer. Always keep your eyes open for new buildings coming out in places you would like to own a store in. For me it would be the salmiya area, and even watch news about new malls popping out. A ideal strategy is to visit the known real estate companies in Kuwait that are concentrated in building malls: Tamdeen RE, Commercail RE  such companies are building now the Kuwait 360 and the dome in Abu Hulaifa respectively. When approaching such new malls that are still in the drawing board stage you get better chances of finding a store, why because such companies like to see committed business people that provide all the details about the store before even finding a place, and when i mean all the detail i mean: store layout, concept, design, logo, projected sales etc the more information you provide the better the chance you got. I still did not introduce the variable ” wasta” because this alone plays a major role in the store acquisition and may delete other basic requirements. What people do not see here is when you start small and create a successful retail shop in one mall in Kuwait, it becomes much easier to acquire another one in a newer mall by providing that you got one successfully running now. But this may even turn out as a two edged sword!? because managment of the new malls only want new concepts and nothing repetitive, so when presenting a concept again and again you may get declined just because you have such a store somewhere else. Who ever said starting a business is easy! if it was then people all around would have been millionaires of some sort:P this approach of finding a store require an act of balance and some insider information from such real estate companies. (Pic via tamdeenrealestate.com)

  

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Rental space & Real estate, Retail, Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.