It has been a brutal half-decade for mall REITs. The 2020 pandemic-induced recession is accelerating valuation declines that were already in place. The long-established trend of accelerating e-commerce has collided with a separate trend of increasingly leveraged retailers. This is resulting in a wave of bankruptcy that will reduce the store counts and restructure balance sheets back to sustainable levels.
But physical retail will still exist, malls will find ways to adapt and some of these are already in process ( see article here on some ways this is happening). In a similar manner to