Approach to the assessment of the competitiveness of real estate objects in retail

. In the last few years, due to economic, political and social events, the situation in the retail real estate market has changed significantly. As consumers increasingly choose to shop online, shopping malls are shifting from multi-vendor and branded merchandise to multifunctional spaces that combine fitness, catering and entertainment areas, business meeting spaces and organization of exhibitions. The desire of buyers to save time, as well as satiety with the usual shopping format, contributes to the introduction of new technologies and retail formats by retailers. The purpose of the study is to identify key indicators of the competitiveness of real estate in retail. Research objectives: analysis of trends in the retail real estate market of St. Petersburg, determination of an integral indicator of the competitiveness of retail real estate objects. Research methods: comparison, analysis and synthesis, generalizations, peer review method. As a result of the study, key factors of competitiveness were identified and a methodology for calculating the competitiveness index of retail real estate objects was presented.


Introduction
In today's unstable economy, the crisis in real estate continues to grow. These trends primarily affected commercial real estate, as business is more sensitive to additional financial burdens, to the restructuring of business processes.
Firstly, large retailers have revised the required size of the selling space of grocery stores. Companies began to refuse to open large-scale hypermarkets and prefer smaller supermarkets, while giving the vacant space for household appliances or clothing stores. Technological solutions that made it possible to reduce the area of retail facilities were: the introduction of self-service checkouts, augmented virtual reality technologies, and electronic fitting rooms [1].
Secondly, the development of the O2O (online-to-offline) trading format has led to an increase in demand for small retail spaces for opening pick-up points and warehouses where goods are collected for online orders and further delivery (darkstore). Today, almost all branches of trade (food products, household goods, ready-made food, etc.) have begun to offer customers to place an order through the application and receive it with home delivery or at the point of issue of orders. Such a service was in high demand, and began to be used by many companies [2]. It is worth noting that this trend has contributed to the development of marketplaces, which are now competing with classic retail stores.
Thirdly, in connection with the change in consumer demand, the very structure of the occupancy of shopping centers was revised. There is no tendency to increase the number of shopping centers, the existing ones cover the demand of the population, and in order to maintain the level of this demand, their owners update the filling of shopping centers -they replace or rebuild some shopping facilities. In place of cinemas, which have ceased to be popular, public spaces, entertainment areas, and fitness clubs have recently begun to open. The trend of opening food halls in large cities, offering a hybrid format of traditional catering, is gaining momentum [3].
Not only the structure of retail facilities, their appearance and content is changing, but also the price. The value of retail real estate is formed under the influence of factors: internal (current state, financial and operational indicators, architectural and design solutions, area, number of storeys, engineering and construction factors, availability of transport infrastructure) and external (income level of the population, real estate prices, tax policy , supply and demand). The second group of factors has been rather unstable in recent years and determined the situation on the market [4]. When conducting a general analysis of prices for commercial real estate, the changes are insignificant.
According to data from the Restate website, the average price for retail real estate in St. Petersburg has grown over 4 years by 48% for sale and by 17% for rent [4]. In general, this change is insignificant, given the fact that inflation in Russia during this period amounted to 26.63% [4], and the price for the sale of residential real estate in St. Petersburg increased by 102%. Nevertheless, a detailed study of the dynamics of the cost of certain categories of commercial real estate shows that there are significant fluctuations. As you can see on the graph, there are no significant changes during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This factor did not affect the cost of rent because the companies have long-term contracts with landlords and can continue to pay rent, except for the commission on the volume of goods turnover. At the same time, restrictions during lockdowns were uneven -shopping centers were subject to more stringent bans than street retail, so there were no significant changes in the value of retail real estate in the aggregate [6]. At the beginning of 2022, there is a decline in the value of retail real estate, which can be due to the aggravated political crisis, a drop in household incomes and demand. So, in the period from 01/28/2022 to 02/24/2022, the rental price decreased by 7.1%.
Further, the decline was replaced by growth, which can be explained by the fall in the ruble exchange rate that began at that time. It is worth noting that this factor had a greater impact on the sale, and not on the lease. The graph shows a significant jump in prices, which soon gave way to a fall, which correlates with the actual exchange rate of the dollar against the ruble in this time period.
Against the backdrop of a rather large number of proposals, the question of building a system for assessing the competitiveness of commercial real estate objects becomes relevant, which, on the one hand, will help to take into account all the client's requests, on the other hand, will give the real estate employee an effective tool for selecting an object [7].

Materials and Methods
The competitiveness of real estate is a set of characteristics of an object (building, structure, territory) that distinguish it from analogue objects in terms of the degree of satisfaction of an individual consumer and the level of costs for its purchase and subsequent operation, as well as its ability to be distinguished by the buyer from other groups of similar objects, offered by sellers, due to higher consumer properties and technical and economic parameters [5]. Competitiveness indicators are a set of criteria for quantifying the level of real estate competitiveness. To assess competitiveness, a system of indicators is used: single, group and integral. Table 1 shows the classification of retail real estate [8].
A single indicator is the percentage of the values of any technical or economic parameters at which the element of need is theoretically completely satisfied (for example, the ratio of the total to the living area of an apartment) [9].
The group indicator combines individual indicators (for example, in addition to the size of the apartment and the number of rooms, the level of finishing, the location of the house, environmental criteria, the presence of an underground garage, etc. are taken into account) and characterizes the degree of satisfaction of the need as a whole.
The integral indicator -a numerical characteristic of the competitiveness of a real estate object -is expressed by the ratio of the obtained group indicator for given characteristics to the maximum possible [10].
To assess the level of competitiveness of various objects and choose the best of them, we calculate an integral indicator -the coefficient of competitiveness of a real estate object.
The calculation of the competitiveness coefficient consists of several stages, the calculation algorithm is presented below [11].
1. Form a set of characteristics of a real estate object, which will be used to compare different objects with each other. For each client, the set of characteristics will be individual, depending on the preferences and requirements for the property.
2. Fill in the "Client Request" column based on the client's requirements for the property.
3. Select several real estate objects that are most suitable for the client's request and fill in the table "Characteristics of the competitiveness of real estate" columns "Characteristics of selected real estate objects" for each of the objects. 4. For each characteristic involved in the analysis, put down in the Table "Assessment of the degree of importance and embodiment of the characteristics of the object" the level of importance for the client in points in the column "Assessment of the degree of importance (I)" using the rating scale from Table 1. Table 1. Scale for assessing the degree of importance of the object characteristics.
The value of the object characteristic Importance rating, score Characteristic of the object to a high degree 5 Characteristic is important 4 The characteristic is important, but not too much 3 Unimportant characteristic 2 Not an important characteristic 1 I find it difficult to answer and evaluate 0 5. For each of the selected objects, assess how each characteristic of the object corresponds to the client's request on a 5-point scale and fill in the columns in the Table  "Embodiment of the given characteristics (AI)" 6. The final level of competitiveness (C) for each of the four properties will be calculated based on the data collected in the previous tables using the formula [12]: where C -the level of competitiveness of the goods,%; AImpi -assessment of the importance of the i-th characteristic of the product, score; AIi -assessment of the implementation of the i-th characteristic of the product, score; ME -maximum evaluation of the implementation, score; N -number of product features. The most competitive will be the property with the highest value of C, the greater the value of the obtained coefficient C to 100%, the more fully this object satisfies the specified client requests.

Results and Discussion
Requirements for the selection of a commercial real estate object are shown in table 2 -in column 3 "Client's request". According to these requirements, the three most suitable real estate objects in the specified area were selected [13,14]:  The characteristics of the selected real estate objects are also displayed in table 2 in columns 4,5,6. For each of the three selected objects, the level of implementation of the specified characteristics was assessed on a 5-point scale and columns 4,5,6 were filled in Table 3 [15]. Table 3. Assessment of the degree of importance and implementation of the object characteristics.  According to the results of calculations, object No. 3 turned out to be the most competitive.

Characteristics of the property
The undoubted advantages of the approach under consideration include the fact that it allows you to take into account the maximum number of characteristics and choose from a variety of options the most suitable for the client's needs.
The disadvantages are that the competitiveness of real estate is assessed primarily in terms of meeting the needs of the buyer. Accordingly, the same objects may have a different competitiveness assessment, in one case high, in the other case low, which complicates the application of this approach in the general analytics of options. Also, the competitiveness of real estate is an unstable concept, determined mainly by price factors, which are among the most important in entrepreneurial activity, as they belong to the group of fixed costs.

Conclusion
Each type of commercial real estate is subject to both universal and specific requirements, the composition of which largely depends on the activities of its future owners and tenants. When evaluating retail premises, first of all, attention is drawn to the trading opportunities of the property being assessed: how does it correspond to the assortment, how its location (accessibility, competitive environment, density and solvency of the population in the relevant area) will affect the turnover and expected profit. For hotels, the recreational potential of the territory, its saturation with historical, architectural and natural monuments, cultural institutions, how attractive the region is for tourists or what interest it is for business people are important. Differences in location within the same city play an important role. The proximity of the center and major transport routes are factors that increase the value of real estate and the value of the rental rate. Such an irrational, but in fact very important characteristic for offices and hotels, as the view from the window, also depends on the location of the property. An absolute advantage for any type of commercial real estate is a land plot: its size, provision of infrastructure, availability of communications and, what is especially important today, the possibility and convenience of parking vehicles. The cost of the site may be affected by restrictions and encumbrances associated with the presence of architectural monuments and unique natural objects.
Of course, when evaluating real estate, the physical condition of the object as a whole and its structural elements in particular are taken into account.
The application of the method under consideration involves a comparison of options for premises as close as possible to the requirements of the customer. At the same time, the development of commodity-money relations leads to ever more aggravated differences in the economic conditions of enterprises, their ever greater diversification, and ever greater differentiation of goods and services. It is becoming more and more difficult to determine the clear geographical boundaries of a particular market, to take into account all competitive factors, which entails difficulties in applying such methods for assessing the competitiveness of real estate, however, in metropolitan cities such as St. Petersburg, there is a huge potential for the development of commercial real estate. And the successful development of the city's economy as a whole largely depends on how efficiently entrepreneurs can select commercial space for their facilities and open them.