Dead Mall Anchors Are Becoming Trampoline Parks in 3 Markets

On 9 October 2026, a Sky Zone opened on the first floor of a former Herberger’s at Apache Mall in Rochester, Minnesota. The space is 48,000 sq ft (4,459 m²). It had been empty since 2018.

Four days earlier, in Toronto, JLL put numbers on the same behaviour. Its North American research tracks 207 location-based entertainment concepts operating across 4,746 locations, with another 721 announced or planned sites representing about 16.5 million sq ft (1.53 million m²) in the pipeline. JLL presented the figures at its Retail Spotlight event on 5 October 2026, and Retail Insider reported them on 7 October.

On 13 October 2026, Knowledge Economic City and BAAN Holding signed a lease to put a family entertainment concept called Level 48 into Multaqa AlMadinah Mall in Saudi Arabia. The signing was announced at Retail Congress MENA in Dubai. The wider development around the mall includes a 390-key Hilton hotel.

Three markets, three landlord types, three operator models. None of these deals is a trampoline operator buying retail space for its own sake. Each is a landlord deciding what a very large empty box is now for.

What follows reads those three events as signals rather than stories, calculates what the box costs the operator who takes it, and sets out what would make the reading wrong. A direction with no disconfirming test is just an opinion with a date attached.

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1. Three properties, three markets, one direction

A single opening is not a trend. The test used here is stricter: three signals pointing the same way, from different countries, different landlords and different operators, none of them a reprint of the same press release.

The three signals differ in almost every respect except the one that matters. In Minnesota, a franchisee took an existing box and made it fit. In Canada, landlords are cutting anchors into 24,000 to 120,000 sq ft slices and letting entertainment take the deep end. In Saudi Arabia, the box is being designed with the operator already in the plan.

All three treat active play as anchor space rather than as a tenant that fills a leftover unit. That is the shift worth watching, and it changes what a trampoline park project looks like before the first drawing.

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2. Signal one: the 48,000 sq ft box that sat empty for eight years

The Apache Mall building opened in October 1969. Its west anchor passed from Montgomery Ward to Herberger’s and then to nothing; the first floor stayed dark from 2018 until the Sky Zone fit-out. The Post Bulletin reported on 10 October 2026 that the mall signed nine new tenants covering 86,000 sq ft (7,990 m²) during the year.

Two of those nine deals account for most of the square footage. Sky Zone took 48,000 sq ft and Kidstruction took 16,000, which is 64,000 sq ft of the 86,000, or about 74% of the year’s new leased area in two activity leases. The rest of the year’s leasing, including a Warby Parker that opened in August, filled the remaining quarter.

The landlord’s own framing is about tenant mix, not about trampolines. Britton Burridge, vice president of leasing for Apache Mall owner GGP, told the Post Bulletin that about 25% of the mall’s tenants are now experience-based, against well under 5% in 2014. He also said GGP’s data shows the Scheels store that replaced Sears in 2015 attracts roughly ten times as many shoppers and generates roughly ten times the sales that Sears did at its peak.

Why the ten-times claim matters: it is the landlord’s number, not the operator’s, and it is the argument a leasing committee will use to justify cutting an anchor into pieces. Treat it as a landlord’s estimate rather than an audited comparison, and ask what baseline year it uses.

The box sets the size of the business before the equipment does

Two details in the Rochester story are more useful to an operator than the headline. The first is that the Sky Zone franchisee, Ashley Youngdale, described 48,000 sq ft as a tight fit for her second park. A box that size is not generous by trampoline park standards; it is workable.

The second is the tenant next door. Kidstruction’s founders looked for sites of at least 15,000 sq ft (1,394 m²) and spent almost two years on the concept before the mall took them seriously. That is the real entry threshold for a soft play and ball pit business in a regional mall: not the equipment budget, but finding a landlord willing to lease 1,400 m² to an unproven operator.

Both constraints point the same way. The scarce input is not trampolines or play structures. It is a large, column-light, high-ceiling room with parking, and the landlords who own those rooms have started to treat active play as the highest bidder for them.

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3. Signal two: Canada is re-letting anchors in 24,000 to 120,000 sq ft slices

Retail Insider’s 7 October 2026 report is the most useful single document on this shift because it lists addresses and square footages rather than adjectives. Six named projects in one country add up to roughly 360,000 sq ft (33,445 m²) of entertainment space, some open and some still in development.

Two mechanisms in that table are worth copying. The first is subdivision. A 120,000 sq ft department store does not need a 120,000 sq ft tenant; it can carry a supermarket on one level and entertainment above it, which is what Nations Experience is building in Oakville around food, entertainment, frequency and dwell time.

The second is trading hours. The Rec Room at Square One stays open as late as 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and PowerPlay at Southcentre runs past midnight on the same nights. A mall that closes at 9 p.m. gains a second trading window from a tenant that does not depend on retail footfall after dark. For a landlord, that is rent collected during hours when the rest of the property earns nothing.

The JLL figures explain the appetite. Across the 4,746 tracked locations, visits reached about 217 million in 2025, up 12% on 2019, and the average visit lasts roughly 140 minutes. A 140-minute visit is not a shopping trip. It is a block of the day, and landlords price leases on how long people stay near the other tenants.

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4. Signal three: the Gulf is commissioning the building and the operator together

The Saudi signal has a different shape. On 13 October 2026, Knowledge Economic City and BAAN Holding signed a lease to bring Level 48 to Multaqa AlMadinah Mall in Madinah, with the announcement made at Retail Congress MENA in Dubai. The mall is the retail component of a mixed-use development that also includes a 390-key Hilton, 66 Hilton-branded residences and offices.

Level 48 is named for BAAN’s 48 years in the entertainment sector. The published description covers immersive attractions, interactive play, adventure activities, social gaming and skill-based challenges. No floor area, attraction count or budget was disclosed, and this article does not estimate them.

The national programme behind one lease is larger than the lease. SEVEN, the entertainment subsidiary of Qiddiya Investment Company, has 14 destinations planned, with Abha and Tabuk opened in August 2026 as the first two. Its capital allocation is stated at more than SAR 45 billion across 13 cities. Spread across 14 destinations, that averages roughly SAR 3.2 billion each, though a programme total is not a project budget and should not be read as one.

The structural difference is timing. In Rochester, the box existed for eight years before anyone found a use for it, and the operator inherited every constraint the building already had. In Madinah, the entertainment concept sits inside the leasing plan for a development whose hotel, residences and offices are being built at the same time. That is the difference between fitting a trampoline park into a building and designing a building around one.

For a manufacturer, the second model is the harder and more valuable one. When the operator arrives after the structure is fixed, the equipment has to absorb the compromises. When the operator arrives before, the equipment list can drive the structure.

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5. What the three signals share, and the arithmetic behind them

The common thread is a building type: 20,000 to 120,000 sq ft, one level or two, columns at retail spacing, parking already built, and a landlord who has written off the previous tenant. What differs is who carries the conversion risk.

Three published numbers combine into benchmarks an operator can test a site against. The first is average size: 16.5 million sq ft across 721 planned sites is about 22,900 sq ft (2,126 m²) per site. The second is visit intensity: 217 million visits across 4,746 locations is about 45,700 visits per location per year, or roughly 2.0 visits per square foot.

The third is rent. CBRE’s Q2 2026 US retail figures put average asking rent at $24.79 per sq ft. Applied to a 48,000 sq ft box, that is about $1.19 million a year. The box in Rochester sat empty from 2018 to 2026, which at that rate is roughly $9.5 million of rent that was never collected.

Read the table as a screening tool, not as a projection. The 2.0 visits per square foot figure is an average across arcades, bowling alleys, climbing gyms and trampoline parks, and a trampoline park will differ because its capacity is set by floor area and supervision ratios rather than by game count. The rent line uses a national average, not the rent any particular landlord signed.

Two conclusions survive those caveats. A 48,000 sq ft box at the national average rent needs roughly 263 visits a day just to carry its rent at the visit intensity the tracked sector averages, before wages, power, insurance and equipment. And whatever rent the operator negotiates, the landlord has already spent eight years not collecting it, which is the strongest argument a tenant has for a contribution to the fit-out.

The comparison to a normal retail lease deserves one more step: see how rent per square foot converts into admissions per day at different rent levels. The method is the same one used above; only the inputs change.

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6. What the box gives you, and what it charges for

A converted anchor is cheap in the ways that show up in a lease and expensive in the ways that show up in a construction programme. The building was designed to hold racks of clothing and shoppers who walk slowly. Six questions decide whether it can hold a trampoline park.

The order matters. Clear height and slab capacity are the two that cannot be bought back later at a sensible price; egress and HVAC can be engineered, but they are the items that turn a three-month fit-out into a nine-month one. Get the sequence wrong and the lease clock runs while the design is redone.

Compliance is a separate question from buildability, and it is jurisdiction-specific. In the United States, ASTM F2970 covers commercial trampoline courts and ASTM F1918 covers soft contained play equipment. In Europe, the EN 1176 series covers playground equipment and EN 1177 covers impact attenuating surfacing, while EN ISO 23659 addresses trampoline parks. These are not translations of one another, and a certificate issued against one does not answer a question asked under another. The practical step is to confirm which framework the local authority will inspect against, then ask the supplier for the test reports that match it; our safety standards page sets out how we document that.

What is not public matters too. Sky Zone has not published the Rochester park’s layout, clear height or bed count, and this article will not invent them. Neither GGP nor the franchisee disclosed the rent. The Canadian projects publish square footage but not conversion cost. Anyone quoting a per-square-foot fit-out figure for these buildings is guessing, and the guess will be wrong by the amount that matters.

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7. What would prove this wrong

Three signals in three countries justify watching a direction. They do not settle it. Here are five observations that would overturn the reading, listed so that they can be checked rather than argued about.

The visits-per-location arithmetic might be going backwards

JLL’s 217 million visits are up 12% on 2019, but the location count is a 2026 figure. If the number of tracked locations grew faster than 12% over the same period, visits per location fell, and the sector would be expanding into a shrinking average rather than a growing one. JLL’s 2019 location count is not in the published summary, so this cannot be settled from the report alone. Until it is, treat the visit growth as a total, not a per-site trend.

One Canadian project has already slipped twice

The Oakville Place conversion of a 120,000 sq ft former Hudson’s Bay has moved from a 2027 opening to late 2026, and then to a staged opening with some entertainment possibly arriving in 2027, according to the timeline compiled in Retail Insider’s coverage. A format that works does not usually need three dates. If other announced conversions slip the same way, the pipeline figure is a wish list rather than a schedule.

Grocery and discount retail can outbid active play

Entertainment is one of several uses competing for the same boxes. Retail Insider notes that landlords are also subdividing anchors for grocery, restaurants and services, and a supermarket pays rent on every square foot without needing a supervision ratio or a liability policy built around falling children. If the next twelve months of anchor relets go mostly to grocery and value retail, entertainment’s share of the pipeline stops rising even if the absolute number keeps growing.

A single tenant failure would be read as a category failure

Sky Zone’s Rochester park is a franchisee’s second site, in a box that franchisee described as a tight fit. If it underperforms, the lesson landlords take will not be about that box’s ceiling height or its parking field. It will be that trampoline parks do not work in regional malls. One closure would carry more weight in a leasing meeting than 721 planned sites.

The 140-minute visit could be an artefact of newness

Long dwell time is what makes entertainment attractive to a landlord. But a new venue attracts long visits because it is new. The tracked average covers concepts at every stage of maturity, so it cannot tell us whether dwell time holds in year four. If mature venues show materially shorter visits than new ones, the case for entertainment as an anchor weakens at renewal, which is when landlords actually find out.

None of those five is far-fetched. Any one of them would move the reading from “landlords are converting anchors for active play” to “some landlords did, in 2026, and then stopped”.

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8. What a 2027 build should put in the lease

If the direction holds, the operator’s leverage is concentrated in one window: between the landlord deciding the box is dead and the lease being signed. After signature, every building constraint becomes the tenant’s problem. Five things belong in that window.

1. A structural and services survey before the letter of intent, not after. Clear height under the lowest beam, slab capacity, column positions and existing HVAC capacity should be measured, not assumed from a leasing plan. Pay for the survey; it costs less than a redesign.

2. A tenant improvement allowance tied to the landlord’s vacancy. A box empty since 2018 has a measurable cost of continuing to sit empty: about $1.19 million a year at the national average rent, and roughly $9.5 million across the eight years in Rochester. That number is the tenant’s argument for a contribution to the fit-out, and it is stronger than any projection.

3. A delivery route written into the agreement. Long steel sections and mat rolls need a path into the box. If the only route is through the mall concourse at night, the cost and the schedule risk belong in the lease, not in a change order later. Our design-to-delivery process starts with those site measurements for this reason.

4. A change-of-use clause that names who pays for the fire strategy. Converting retail to assembly use triggers a fresh egress calculation. Whoever pays for it should be decided before the architect starts, because the answer changes the layout. The same problem appears whenever a former gym or retail unit becomes a trampoline park.

5. A zoning plan that survives a bad year. The reason a 48,000 sq ft box works is not that it holds a lot of trampolines. It is that the floor can be re-cut when one attraction stops earning. Treating the trampoline as one zone inside a larger box is what makes a ten-year lease survivable; a single-purpose hall is what makes it fragile.

Decision rules, by box size

If the box is under 15,000 sq ft, a trampoline park is the wrong use. That is soft play, ninja or a compact multi-attraction format, and the equipment list should be built around one anchor attraction rather than a bed field.

If the box is 20,000 to 50,000 sq ft, it is the size the market is actually converting, and the binding constraint is usually clear height rather than area. Measure the lowest beam before anything else.

If the box is above 80,000 sq ft, plan for subdivision from day one. The Canadian examples at 80,000 and 120,000 sq ft are not single tenants; each is entertainment plus food plus retail under one roof, and the play element is one component of the mix.

The equipment side of that decision is where we work: trampoline systems for the bed field, indoor playground equipment for the soft play and toddler zones, and the material specifications that determine how either survives year five.

Get a free design and quote →

Send us the box’s dimensions, clear height and column grid. We will tell you what fits before you sign anything.

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FAQ

How much space does a trampoline park need in a mall?

Most converted mall boxes fall between 20,000 and 50,000 sq ft (1,858 to 4,645 m²), and 48,000 sq ft is a common anchor size. Below roughly 15,000 sq ft a full bed field stops making sense and a soft play or ninja format fits better. The average planned location-based entertainment site in JLL’s North American pipeline works out to about 22,900 sq ft, a figure that includes bowling, arcades and climbing as well as trampolines.

Can a former department store be converted into a trampoline park?

Yes, and 2026 produced several examples, including a 48,000 sq ft former Herberger’s in Rochester, Minnesota. The conversion hinges on clear height under the lowest beam, slab live-load capacity, column spacing and a route for long steel into the building. Retail egress and HVAC are usually sized for shoppers rather than for assembly use, so both need recalculating before the design is fixed.

What ceiling height does a trampoline park need?

It depends on the attraction mix, not on one national figure. A bed field needs headroom above the highest expected jump, while a mezzanine, tall slide or elevated course needs considerably more and also needs the structure to carry it. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and by the standard being applied, so the working number should come from a measured survey of the specific box plus the local authority’s requirement, not from a generic specification.

Why are malls leasing to trampoline parks and indoor playgrounds?

Because those tenants absorb 16,000 to 80,000 sq ft that no single retailer wants, and they keep visitors on site for around 140 minutes, the average across the entertainment concepts JLL tracks. Some also trade past midnight, which gives the landlord income after the mall closes. At Apache Mall, the landlord estimates that about 25% of tenants are now experience-based, against under 5% in 2014.

What should a lease include for an indoor play tenant?

Five items: a structural and services survey before the letter of intent, a tenant improvement allowance justified by the landlord’s vacancy cost, a written delivery route for long equipment, a change-of-use clause naming who pays for the fire strategy, and a zoning plan flexible enough to re-cut the floor if one attraction stops earning. Each converts a construction risk into a negotiated term.

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Sources

1. Post Bulletin, “New experiences are attracting shoppers to an evolving Apache Mall”, 10 October 2026 — postbulletin.com
2. Retail Insider, “Entertainment Becomes a New Anchor for Canadian Shopping Centres”, 7 October 2026 — retail-insider.com
3. JLL research on location-based entertainment, presented at Retail Spotlight & Reception, Toronto, 5 October 2026, as reported by Retail Insider
4. Company release, “BAAN Holding and Knowledge Economic City Sign Lease Agreement to Bring Level 48 to Multaqa AlMadinah Mall”, 13 October 2026 — saudionlinecom.com
5. Mubasher, “Knowledge Economic City, BAAN Holding to bring Level 48 to Madinah Mall”, 13 October 2026 — mubasher.info
6. Saudi Shopper, “SEVEN Showcases Entertainment Projects at Furas Al Sharqiya Exhibition”, 12 October 2026 — saudishopper.com.sa
7. CBRE, “Q2 2026 U.S. Retail Figures”, 2026 — cbre.com
8. ASTM International, F2970 (commercial trampoline courts) and F1918 (soft contained play equipment) — astm.org
9. ISO, EN ISO 23659 (trampoline parks) and the EN 1176 and EN 1177 series — iso.org