Brookfield Property Partners spent billions in 2018 to assume full ownership of mall-owner GGP when malls were out of favor on Wall Street. Executives at the firm defended this contrarian bet in part by saying that they would turn most of the company’s 125 malls into minicities with residences, offices or hotels as well as stores. Six years later, only two malls, in Atlanta and near Seattle, have been redeveloped in this way, with another two—in North Carolina and Denver—in the pipeline.

The slow pace of its redevelopment efforts shows how difficult, expensive and time consuming it is to revamp enclosed malls.

Getting approvals from cities and towns is a lengthy and sometimes contentious process, often because of community pushback. And other mall tenants, particularly department stores, often have multidecade contracts that allow them to block nonretail development.

Brookfield executives say they are only at the beginning of their long-term plans for their mall portfolio. They have redeveloped more than 40 former department stores since 2018 and say they will continue to move forward with residential and other nonretail projects where it makes financial sense. But they acknowledged that the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by rising construction costs and interest rates, have delayed and, in some cases, scuttled redevelopments.

wsj.com - Brookfields plan to turn malls into minicities falls short