AYD’s mall index hit 5,990 points in May, how should store owners read the jump?

Nominal growth runs at 35.4% in March, 30.5% in April and 41.7% in May. The series is not a straight line; it rises and falls month by month. That alone shows the risk of deciding anything from a single month’s headline.

Perakende Türkiye gives no reason. Fintables links the jump to Eid al-Adha, known in Türkiye as Kurban Bayramı, and that is a single-source reading. Holiday months and ordinary months do not belong in the same basket.

No. The report runs in August but describes May. As of October 2026 we also have August data, and the picture is different: 5,392 points, 22.9% nominal growth and a third month in a row of real contraction.

Mall management talks about nominal growth, while your profit comes from real growth. If rent climbs as fast as nominal sales, your rent-to-sales ratio worsens even when your real sales stand still.

It does not cancel it; it puts it in context. May is a strong month, while June, July and August show real contraction. That gives you data to push back if May is held up as the benchmark in autumn negotiations.

It is not. According to Fintables, the visitor index rises 14.3% year on year in May. The gap between visitor growth and sales growth shows how much of the rise comes from basket size and price.

The group covers gifts, toys, cinemas, children’s play areas, and books and magazines. In a month when families come to the mall together, these tills ring faster.

A rise below inflation means fewer goods sold in real terms. When sales per square metre fall in large-format tenants like these, a debate about the tenant mix can open up.

In March, personal care leads at 59%, technology follows at 58% and food and beverage at 47.2%. By May the lead moves to entertainment and hobby. Since the ranking changes from month to month, do not treat one month’s leader as permanent.

Sales per square metre in Istanbul are clearly higher than in Anatolia. But rent in Istanbul is high too. If you read sales without rent in a location decision, you get half the picture.

If your store is below average, first separate the cause. Is the space too large, is the product just sitting on the shelf, or are customers walking out empty-handed? Each one needs a different fix.

May carries a holiday effect, so it is not a benchmark on its own. Line up at least three months and compare your own sales with the same months.

Fill in the store’s business profile completely, including the mall name and floor. Update photos and promotions regularly, and reply to reviews.

Track till data weekly in the same sheet as map searches and web traffic. In weeks when conversion drops, the first place to look is often the search result, not the store.

Your own sales per square metre, your category’s May rise and the real contraction in August are the three strongest numbers on the table. Turkish malls fall under Law 6585 and the Shopping Malls Regulation, and you can see the framework on the Ministry of Trade’s shopping malls page. Verify with the official source; this is not legal or financial advice.

Study the target mall’s tenant mix and where your category sits in it. We cover a manufacturer’s decision to build its own store network in our piece on Mısırlı’s 111-store target, and protecting margins as sales slip in our piece on Mavi’s first quarter.

It does not. The index is an average, so do not draw conclusions until you calculate your own sales per square metre and compare the same months.

Mall management may use it, but May carries a holiday effect and August shows a real contraction. Go into the meeting with several months of data.

In the May data reported by Fintables, the Anatolia average is TL 20,367 per square metre. Since the method is unknown, use this figure as a rough reference.