Sisa Ngebulana has been in the property game for 22 years and founded his company, Billion Group, by consolidating assets in 1998. Ngebulana began building shopping centres in 2002, initially with Mdantsane City in the township outside East London in the Eastern Cape.The 90000m² Hemingways Mall, which he began building in East London in 2007, introduced him to the art of war in malls: who gets the best site and attracts the most shoppers.In Gauteng, new malls spring up regularly to cannibalise each other, but the building of super-regional malls in the Eastern Cape is a long-term strategy.story_article_left1Ngebulana said it was a challenge to change shopper behaviour, which means Baywest may take six years to become profitable, compared with an industry average of about four."It's good for a fund like Rebosis [Billion Group's property fund] to get in at an early stage, when rentals are low and income is lower, so as the mall reaches its peak you benefit from the turnovers and leases with turnover percentages."Mostly, he said, developers were financially unable to hang on until malls became profitable. "With a big monster like this, sometimes you have to keep ploughing money in. Sometimes developers sell out just as it blossoms and it becomes someone else's gain."Even more important than the exit strategy is the fight for control. "In East London [with Hemingways], I had all the developers in the country with competing projects. We all agreed there could be only one big scheme - that's what the city warranted."Ngebulana beat a variety of developers for Hemingways, and flew national retail CEOs over his site, which was closest to the freeway, to persuade them to come on board."I won the rights within eight weeks on the basis of location. But then I had an even bigger challenge ... not having a contractor to build the mall, because they were occupied with World Cup stadiums."So he poached the best construction team from Grinaker.full_story_image_hleft1Ngebulana said. " I was put in a spot. Business is ruthless. If I couldn't deliver I'd never have been trusted to do another scheme. "Neil Cloete, who was MD of Grinaker-LTA at the time, said he and Ngebulana had had a chat (after the Grinaker team jumped ship) but there was no bad blood. "That's business - people are hired and leave all the time".Summing up the experience, Ngebulana said: "The challenges seemed insurmountable. It took four months off the 26 months we had to build Hemingways, but we opened on the agreed date. We got it done."sub_head_start Click and collect is where the future lies sub_head_endNgebulana is now targeting UK malls through New Frontier Properties. He said the UK had the world's most developed online shopping market. He is also developing elsewhere in Africa, where shoppers can be hard to find."If you have a big risk appetite and patience, Africa offers a lot of opportunity, although infrastructure constraints mean the radius of appeal is 4km as opposed to 20km in South Africa."He said he would not package all the African malls into Rebosis. "We'll set up separate, perhaps regional, funds for that. Risk appetites of investors differ, and we might exclude some investors if we bulk everything together. We have to be aware of the makeup of the continent and where investors come from."Eastern Europe also presents opportunities, such as in Poland and the Czech Republic, but Ngebulana said the UK had proved that malls would not be killed off by the internet. "It's arguably the best economy in the world, while it is very difficult to do business in a protectionist US. In the UK, retail sales are up 5.7%, they have 3% economic growth, it's a first-world economy with ease of doing business. Footfall is up 4%."This defied expectations in the world's most penetrated online shopping market, he said. "It's turned out to be good for mall shopping because shops have simply moved to smaller formats but expanded their footprints to be everywhere so shoppers can click and collect."That's the future of shopping centres - the UK is a testament to the opportunities for developers." ..