The Impact of Cost Items on the Development Cost of Shopping Centers

Türkiye’s shopping center count increased from 69 in the 2000s to 241 in 2024, as investors recognized shopping center investment as lucrative. The location and type of shopping center significantly affect future revenue. The development phase involves construction and non-construction costs. Consultants and contractors use past data to estimate these costs, though actual figures are unavailable. While the impact ratios of these sub-cost items on the overall cost are known based on the experience of real estate consultants and contracting companies, they cannot be presented as actual figures for investors to evaluate. This study aims to reveal how the cost items that constitute the development costs of a shopping center project impact each other, and to what degree they affect it, using a random forest model that can model non-linear relationships and determine the degree to which development cost items influence each other in shopping center investments. The feature importance levels obtained from the random forest model suggest that physical size and capacity are the most significant factors in estimating shopping center construction costs.