Recently, companies that manage malls in various cities have raised rents due to more challenging foreign exchange rates, which is an indicator of the current financial crisis. In response, some shop owners in the shopping malls affected have begun to protest the rent hikes by closing down their stores. Some shopping mall managers have decided to decrease their rents and peg the rent level to foreign exchange rates, while others have found the solution in reducing their rents to different levels but with the express consent of their retailers.

A number of shopping malls have recently been opened throughout Turkey. Currently, there are, on average 58 square meters of shopping mall retail space per 1,000 people in the country. In Ankara, this level rises to 179 square meters. Some managers from the largest shopping malls in Ankara evaluated the latest developments yesterday of the effects of the global financial crisis on business.

General Manager of the Armada shopping mall Yıldır Ertem said yesterday that there should be a balance between rents and the needs of the shop owners. He added that they had decided to decrease rent by 15 percent for each of the 160 shops at the mall. This is a reversal of last year's rent increases at the mall. The manager of CEPA, a recently opened shopping mall in the capital also said that they had decided to peg their exchange rate with the US dollar to $1 / YTL 1.25 from November onwards. Atilla Işıldar added that he expected the crisis would come to an end by September 2009. The marketing manager of Panora shopping mall, Pınar Aydın, said that they had also reduced rents in July.