Big Brand Physical Presence Effects on Attractiveness of Urban Areas in Klang Valley

In many cases, retail planning had been an very important part of urban planning. Therefore, many urban design practices had incorporated retail planning from the beginning to push for the highest chance of attracting interest from investors and inhabitants. Just like the common scene in planning of shopping malls that were planned around a crowd-pulling anchor tenant, as many studies on the impact of anchor tenants on the success of shopping mall had been conducted(Ingene and Ghosh, 1990). These new urban development look at the crowd pulling effect of its major component. Universities, big-box retailers, convention centers, water park are some of the factors that are deemed to be important. In fact, the overall quality of the lifestyle amenities in a place makes a place more affluent (Rossi, 2017a) and thus draw residents that are attracted by this affluent lifestyle. The quality of the urban amenities is essential to create an attractive and affluent urban area. This is particularly important as affluent areas like this will make the place a lively urban area instead of another residential area that compliments major cities. Using change in house price as indicator for attractiveness, this research uses statistical anaylis to investigate if anchor tenant theory and creative class theory is applicable on increasing the attractiveness of a place. Branded coffee stores is chosen to represent urban amenities as coffee store is an important retail sector in Malaysia and can be widely seen in all urban areas. Through panel data analysis, it’s found that the opening of new coffee stores does not bring positive impact to all houses. Only houses within certain distance from Mcdonald’s reacted positively in terms of value appreciation. While houses that located in new CBTL store locality responded negatively to the opening of the store. No clear pattern can be identified from the results of analysis. Therefore, the relation between quality amenities represented by reputable coffee store brands and the attractiveness can’t be clearly confirmed in this research.