After years of difficulty in establishing the use of active facades in buildings in São Paulo, the real estate sector is now in a new moment: more attentive to the final destination of the spaces and aligned with possible investors, developers have come to have the buyers of these assets as partners in residential projects.
New projects try to solve some problems that, historically, have hindered the liquidity of spaces intended for commerce and services on the ground floor of buildings since 2015. While better energy and exhaust infrastructure, as well as natural ventilation, shade and square footage, have encouraged the arrival of restaurants and aesthetic centers on active facades, adaptations in contract models have even attracted notary offices to the spaces.
“In the most recent version of active facades, the project already has to be well thought out at the outset. It is a challenge for the developer: to think about the user of the space. Just as he dedicates time to understanding the final buyer of the residential, he also has to dedicate an important time to the logic of using these spaces”, says the director of portfolio services at real estate consultancy JLL, Roberto Patiño.
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Encouraging active facades
Since , mainly responsible for encouraging the adoption of active facades in real estate projects, occupancy rates have always remained at levels far from ideal. The São Paulo Commercial Association (ACSP) made the calculation: in 2023, vacancy in these spaces was 60% to 80%.
In some of the first projects to include these spaces, the following happened: while the designs didn’t take end consumers into account, the residential sales team often didn’t know . Seduced by the sales potential similar to the cost of the residential area, many investors even entered the business, only to see the asset “burn in their hands”. Shopkeepers and service providers would not be able to take advantage of the spaces.
And why did the developers, then, decide to join them? Because, according to the master plan, all the space dedicated to an active facade can be added to the building’s constructive potential. In other words, every square meter allocated to stores with public access on the ground floor can be converted into more apartment floors on the upper floors.
The idea of the measure is to promote more dynamic uses of public spaces and connect buildings to sidewalks and, consequently, to the traffic of people outside the buildings. The inspiration, says Patiño, are “15-minute cities”, a concept imported from France to define urban models in which a resident can access almost all daily services within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle.
Vila Mariana, Ibirapuera, Perdizes, Vila Madalena, Santo Amaro and Rebouças are the axes with the highest number of developments with active facades, while the largest proportion of developments with these spaces is concentrated in Santa Cecília, Vila Madalena and Perdizes.
“For active facades to really have an impact, the administration, when adjusting the Law, needs to carry out an analysis of each of the neighborhoods. Each street in São Paulo has its specificities”, says the vice-president of ACSP, Andrea Matarazzo. “There is no point in putting up an active facade where there is no consumer. This balance must be done, but it cannot be a general law for the entire city, it is very specific to each place.”
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However, just the geographical distribution and the vocation of the neighborhoods in which they are located do not explain everything. The design of these areas went through several adaptations until developers arrived at one (or several) ideal models.
Suitable projects from the start
One Innovation, dedicated to developments in the neighborhoods of Perdizes, Pinheiros, Itaim and Jardins, for example, decided to reduce the size of the active facades of its buildings by half.
“In our previous buildings we built very large facades, measuring 300 to 400 square meters. We realized that it was very difficult to sell, because the rent was more expensive, we needed a larger tenant”, says the vice-president of One Innovation, Paulo Petrin.
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The projects could even be sold, but the process took more time. One Innovation then looked for retail consultancies to better study the regions and size of the projects. Today, 80% of the active facades in the developer’s projects are occupied.
In more modern designs, active facades also needed to resolve structural issues that, until recently, were minimized. “They needed to deal with exhaustion, how the entry and exit of support material works. Trash, for example, how to deal with it on a daily basis without creating discomfort with the stores? The same goes for restaurants that have delivery operations”, explains Patiño, from JLL.
Porte, responsible for a real estate axis of more than 10 buildings in the East Zone of São Paulo, is another developer with an eye on the possibilities in active facades. “For us, the issue of active facades makes sense even before the Master Plan incentives”, says the developer’s commercial director, Igor Melro.
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Until 2014, the company had already tried to develop projects that included active facades, but found it difficult to make them viable without incentives. The difficulty was not just for Porte. According to a survey by ACSP, of the 218 projects with active facades in 2023, 94.3% were built after the Master Plan, while only 5.6% are before it.
In addition to the stimulus proposed by the legislation, Porte also realized that, to provide liquidity to its assets, it would need to find sales models that would guarantee harmony with buyers. As an alternative to simply purchasing the land, some of the owners of the company’s active residential facades join the project as partners.
“What we learned more recently was to avoid selling these stores one by one. When you sell them as an alternative to building wealth, the entrepreneur ends up with the space as a financial asset, he has no knowledge on the topic”, says Igor Melro.
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One of the company’s decisions was to create an area called Asset Management. Made up of people with experience in areas such as retail, the sector helps investors find the most suitable tenants to rent spaces for their businesses or services on the building’s active facades. Today, the developer’s investors have 70% to 80% occupancy on the facades.
As the axis of buildings built by Porte is geographically close, the company also seeks to work with investors to occupy the active facades with a complementary variety of companies. Recently, for example, the 12th Notary Office left the address it occupied for years in Alameda Santos to occupy the commercial area of a Porte building and serve the East Zone.
The logic behind the composition of different services and establishments is the same as that of a shopping mall: “Using the model, you can charge less from those who generate the flow of people and more from those who, eventually, have a slightly smaller position. It’s like replicating the anchor and satellite stores of a shopping mall”, says Melro.
Improvement in the structure and planning of active facades can reverse the dominance of a profile of convenience stores and minimarkets in the use of these structures. Stores such as Oxxo, Minuto Pão de Açúcar, Carrefour and Multi Things are mentioned in the ACSP survey as some of the most present businesses.
“In this new version of active facades, there are not just amenities stores, but something that offers good service and has a well-defined environment. That is the challenge. Constructing the building ends up being a commodity, designing the projects is what will really have value”, points out Patiño, from JLL.
