How Rising Rental Demand is Transforming Commercial Retail Strategy

Housing market shifts could reshape rental operating models for commercial real estate owners

According to Deloitte's real estate research team, the share of US households renting could climb from 34.3% today to 39.3% by 2035, with the renter population potentially growing by as much as 21.7% to roughly 56.3 million households. Deloitte ties that shift to pricing compression — home prices outpacing income growth and shutting more consumers out of ownership. It is a slow-moving wave, but it is the largest consumer-base shift we will see this decade, and it changes how every ground-floor retailer and mixed-use landlord should plan the next three lease cycles.

Living-as-a-service eats into your footprint

The Deloitte analysis introduces a model the firm calls "living-as-a-service," or LaaS — a subscription-style operating platform that bundles maintenance, connectivity and amenities across a rental portfolio rather than chasing single leases. Think of it the way we think about a loyalty ecosystem: the goal is to keep the renter inside one platform, the same way we want to keep a shopper inside one store.

If you operate retail inside or adjacent to multifamily properties, watch this. Amenity-rich buildings are starting to absorb functions that used to live in shopping centers. Package rooms replace shipping counters. Coworking lounges eat into café sales. Pet spas absorb pet-store trips. Each micro-amenity is a category that used to walk through your front door, and Deloitte is steering owners toward monetizing them through subscription pricing rather than pass-through rent. Your endcap is no longer competing with the store across the street — it is competing with the lobby downstairs, and the lobby never has a closing shift.

Three numbers we are pinning to the planning wall

Here is what we are telling clients to track right now. First, the share of new multifamily developments in your trade area that include ground-floor retail with built-in amenity crossover — that is your future competition, and it is showing up in the planogram, not on the leasing sheet. Second, dwell time at the building perimeter versus inside the amenity floor; owners following the LaaS playbook will engineer sightlines that pull residents back to the lobby and your storefront, instead of letting them stay upstairs with the app. Third, SKU density in any category that overlaps with bundled amenities — if the landlord bundles Wi-Fi, streaming, fitness or co-working, your electronics or apparel endcap cannot lean on impulse alone; you have to re-engineer the sightline and the dwell path to earn the basket before the resident rides the elevator home.

The slow part is the trap. Deloitte is laying out a decade-long glide path, not a quarter-end shock, and the retailers who wait for the data to "prove it" will be the ones handing the lease renewal to the LaaS operator who already took the amenity floor.