By Colleen Cleary
A stat from a Wall Street Journal piece back in March has stuck with me: in 2025, service-based tenants leased more retail square footage in the U.S. than goods-based tenants for the first time ever. Just over 50%, according to CoStar. Fifteen years ago that number was 40%.
What that translates to on the ground is something I’d been noticing without quite putting words to: a lot of the new retail space being absorbed in Florida isn’t going to stores at all. It’s going to gyms, Pilates studios, med spas, recovery clinics, blow-dry bars, IV hydration shops, and a long list of other businesses that don’t sell you a thing — they sell you a service.
To be clear, this isn’t big box disappearing. Grocery, home improvement, and off-price retail are all still leasing confidently, and even mall retail is holding up better than the headlines tend to suggest. What’s shifting is the mix around those anchors — and what’s backfilling the boxes that have come back to market.
What’s actually driving it
A few things at once. E-commerce is up to 16.4% of total retail sales, nearly double what it was a decade ago, and a lot of the categories that have given back the most space — drugstores, office supply, craft and hobby, general merchandise — used to be reliable anchors. Walgreens, Rite Aid, Joann, Big Lots, Party City. Those closures have put real square footage back on the market. At the same time, the U.S. wellness market hit $2.1 trillion in 2024 per the Global Wellness Institute, and fitness alone accounted for about 30% of all service-based retail leases last year — up from 20% in 2016.
One line from the WSJ piece stuck with me. Brandon Svec at CoStar said, “A handbag used to be the luxury symbol. Today, a more common sign of status is spending money on things like yoga classes or facials.” That tracks with what I see in Naples and Fort Myers, where high-end aesthetic clinics and boutique fitness keep opening at a steady clip — often in the kinds of spaces that used to house drugstores, banks, and casual dining.
The co-tenancy angle I keep coming back to
The piece of this that’s most interesting to me from a leasing perspective isn’t the macro trend. It’s how landlords are starting to build around it.
In the past, a center was anchored by a grocery store or a general merchandise store, and the inline tenants filled the gaps. What I’m watching now is centers being built — or repositioned — around a shared customer rather than a shared anchor. A med spa, a Pilates studio, a juice bar, and a hair salon don’t compete with each other. They share a customer who’s likely to walk between two or three of them in the same visit.
