Ask anyone who has handled location requests from retailers in Croatia and they will tell you the same thing: the first questions are rarely about rent. They are about access, visibility and, above all, parking. How many spaces? How close to the entrance? Can a car get in and out without turning across traffic? Only once those answers are satisfactory does the conversation move to price. This is not a quirk of negotiation. It reflects how retail chains actually build a business case for a new store, and it says a lot about what landlords and developers should prepare before they ever send out a leasing brochure.
Why parking comes before price
For a retailer, rent is a known cost that can be modelled. Sales are the uncertain part, and in most Croatian towns outside the historic centres, sales depend on how easily a customer can arrive by car, park and leave with their shopping. Retail parks, discount food stores, DIY, pet, home and drugstore formats all rely on short, purpose-driven visits. If parking is tight, badly laid out or shared with uses that fill it at the wrong hours, the expected turnover drops, and no rent discount fully compensates for that.
That is why expansion managers often treat parking as a filter rather than a variable. A site that fails the access test is dropped early, regardless of how attractive the headline rent is. A site that passes it gets a detailed look, and only then does price become the main topic.
What a retailer is really asking
“How many parking spaces?” is shorthand for a set of more specific questions:
- Ratio, not just number. Retailers compare spaces against total leasable area and against their own unit. A large car park shared with a busy anchor may still feel full to a small tenant at the far end.
- Distance and line of sight. Shoppers prefer to see the shop entrance from their car. Units hidden behind a building or reachable only by a long walk underperform, even when the total number of spaces is generous.
- Access from the road. Left turns across a main road, a single shared entrance or a junction that backs up at peak times are frequent deal-breakers. Retailers look at the site at 5 pm on a Friday, not at 10 am on a Tuesday.
- Peak behaviour. Saturday mornings, pre-holiday weeks and the summer season in coastal towns are when a car park proves itself. A tenant will want to know how the site performs at those moments.
- Who else uses it. Offices, a gym, a school or a residential building next door can occupy spaces exactly when shoppers need them. Clear rules on shared use matter.
- Deliveries. A service yard that crosses the customer car park creates conflicts and safety concerns, especially for food and DIY operators with frequent truck deliveries.
What location enquiries tell you about the market
Enquiries are a useful signal for landlords and developers. When retailers ask first about access and parking, they are telling you that convenience is the product. The format that wins in smaller and mid-sized Croatian towns is the one that makes a quick, predictable trip possible. This also explains why some older inner-city or multi-level schemes struggle to attract tenants despite lower rents: the rent may be competitive, but the effort required to shop there is not.
It is also worth watching which questions disappear. If a retailer stops asking about parking and moves straight to fit-out, delivery dates and lease terms, the site has passed the first filter. If the same questions keep coming back in different forms, the issue has not been resolved in their eyes, and lowering the rent will rarely fix it.
What landlords and developers should prepare
A leasing package that answers the parking questions upfront saves weeks of back-and-forth and signals professionalism. In practice, that means:
- A clear site plan showing every parking space, entrances and exits, pedestrian routes and the delivery yard, with each unit marked.
- The parking ratio for the scheme and, where relevant, for each building or row of units.
- Information on road access: how traffic enters and leaves, whether a junction upgrade or roundabout is planned, and the status of any permits for it.
- Rules on shared use, opening hours of the car park, any paid parking plans and how they would affect shoppers.
- Signage and visibility options from the main road, including pylon positions.
For developers still at the planning stage, the lesson is to design the car park around the shopping trip, not only around the minimum required by the local spatial plan. The legal minimum and the commercially sufficient number are not always the same, and the layout often matters as much as the total.
Rent still matters — but later
None of this means price is unimportant. Once access is accepted, retailers negotiate rent, service charges, indexation and incentives as firmly as ever. The point is the sequence: a site that solves parking and access gives the landlord a stronger position in those discussions, because the retailer can see the sales potential. A site that does not solve them ends up competing on price alone, which is the weakest position a property can be in.
2.advice advises landlords, developers and retailers across Croatia — send an enquiry.