Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
Retail construction is supposed to be a shrinking category. The thinking goes that e-commerce ate the mall, and what is left is redevelopment, not new building. SpecIndex's own bid and permit corpus does not support the shrinking category story.
It shows 19,617 retail related construction projects opened or announced since January 1, 2025, carrying $17.4 billion in disclosed estimated value. That is the highest project count of any sector SpecIndex has run this comparison against, manufacturing and renewables included.
Facts at a glance
- The 19,617 retail projects, the 1,853 manufacturing projects, and the 3,359 renewable energy projects are all retained from the same original September 2026 count, on the same basis, for the same window. (From: Method note and scope.)
- All other figures in this article, including the $17.4 billion combined disclosed value and the state counts and values in the table, are also retained from that original September 2026 count. (From: Method note and scope.)
Florida leads on count and New York leads on dollars
Florida leads by a wide margin: 6,659 projects since January 2025, worth $2.78 billion in disclosed value. Texas follows at 3,735 projects ($934 million), then New York at 2,993 projects.
New York's disclosed dollar value, $6.44 billion, is more than double Florida's despite roughly 3,700 fewer projects. California (1,988 projects, $538 million), Illinois (847, $754 million) and Georgia (708, $487 million) round out the top tier.
| State | Projects (2025-01-01 to present) | Disclosed value |
|---|---|---|
| Florida | 6,659 | $2.78B |
| Texas | 3,735 | $934M |
| New York | 2,993 | $6.44B |
| California | 1,988 | $538M |
| Illinois | 847 | $754M |
| Georgia | 708 | $487M |
| Tennessee | 252 | $318M |
Download CSV (the rows above, exactly as shown)
*Source: SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records, `description`/`name` matched on retail and shopping-center language, `opened_or_announced_date >= 2025-01-01`.*
Florida's project count is consistent with what Census Bureau commercial construction spending data and ICSC's own retail real estate reporting have both described for several years running: population growth in the state has kept retail vacancy at some of the lowest levels nationally, and new store construction has followed rather than stalled. New York's disproportionate dollar total, by contrast, is driven by a small number of very large mixed use and entertainment anchor projects rather than broad retail strip volume.
The projects setting New York's number are not stores
The largest disclosed single project in the corpus by a wide margin is the Resorts World NYC Phase Two Expansion, at $5.5 billion. That is more than three quarters of New York's entire retail category dollar total on its own. Oklahoma's Rock Creek Entertainment District, at $1.1 billion, and several Massachusetts mixed use towers with ground floor retail in the $300 million to $500 million range, are the same pattern repeated: retail construction now rides inside larger mixed use, entertainment or hospitality developments rather than standing alone as a freestanding shopping center or strip mall.
That has a real implication for how "retail construction" should be read as a category going forward. A search on retail language alone surfaces integrated use projects (casino and retail complexes, hotel and retail towers, stadium district developments) rather than the standalone big box or strip center format that used to define the category. The count of 19,617 projects understates this shift, since a share of the smaller records in the corpus are genuinely standalone retail builds, while the largest dollar figures are being set by developments where retail is one component among several.
Tenant names sit in the corpus record for these projects
SpecIndex's corpus records name specific retail tenants and grocery anchors on individual projects. Target, In-N-Out and Life Time appear together on one Utah development record in the corpus, alongside the developer and general contractor. Publix and Raley's each appear as named anchors on separate grocery anchored projects.
Those are project record statements. No bid document or page is cited for them in this article.
That tenant level detail, tied to a specific address and general contractor, is not available from aggregate retail vacancy or square footage statistics. It is the layer a project record carries and a market report does not.
Retail construction has not stopped, it has redistributed
The count alone is the clearest evidence in SpecIndex's own corpus that retail construction has not stopped: 19,617 projects across at least 15 states with enough volume to register, versus 1,853 for manufacturing and 3,359 for renewable energy in the same window. Both of those categories get more construction trade coverage right now.
Retail has redistributed. It has moved away from the standalone strip mall format and into mixed use and entertainment anchored developments. It has moved toward the states where population growth is still outrunning existing retail square footage rather than the reverse, with Florida foremost among those states.
Method note and scope
We counted retail related projects in SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records. The match rule the article describes is retail and shopping center language matched in a project's `description` or `name`. The date field is `opened_or_announced_date`, and the window is January 1, 2025 onward.
The cross sector comparison is the point of this article, so all three counts are dated together. The 19,617 retail projects, the 1,853 manufacturing projects, and the 3,359 renewable energy projects are all retained from the same original September 2026 count, on the same basis, for the same window.
All other figures in this article, including the $17.4 billion combined disclosed value and the state counts and values in the table, are also retained from that original September 2026 count. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and will not match a live count run later.
Disclosed value means the estimated value stated on a record where a record states one. A record with no stated value adds to project count and adds nothing to the dollar total, so the dollar totals are floors.