The New Anchor Is the Drivethrough Cluster

In many new retail parks, the prize is no longer one anchor box but a well-orchestrated cluster of drive-thru brands turning traffic into rent.

Retail landlords are increasingly underwriting traffic systems, not just tenant rosters, as drive-thru pads become the most strategic square footage in new open-air developments.

The old retail-park logic was simple enough. Secure a dependable anchor, fill in the small-shop line-up, and let co-tenancy do the rest. That model still matters, but across many newer U.S. open-air projects the real design problem is starting to look different. Landlords are spending more time on stacking, circulation, ingress, and escape lanes because the most valuable part of the site may no longer be a single large tenant. It may be a cluster of drive-thru operators that can turn cars into rent several times a day.

From anchor risk to traffic portfolio

This is a subtle but important shift in how retail parks are being conceived. In a tighter development environment, landlords have become more selective about where they place capital and more creative about how they extract yield from scarce land. Industry leasing commentary over the past year has repeatedly pointed to strong outparcel demand, low levels of new retail construction, and rising interest in redeveloping parking fields or excess land into new pads. That matters because a multi-pad drive-thru configuration spreads leasing risk across several smaller, high-productivity users instead of tying the project narrative to one dominant box.

In practice, that means the landlord is building a traffic portfolio. One coffee concept captures the morning commute. A chicken, burger, or sandwich operator takes lunch and dinner. A beverage or dessert brand extends daypart coverage into late afternoon and evening. The result is a site that monetises velocity rather than simply occupancy.

Why beverage brands changed the site plan

The biggest catalyst has been the rise of small-footprint beverage concepts and highly engineered quick-service formats. Brands such as 7 Brew have expanded at extraordinary speed with compact, drive-thru-heavy boxes that prioritise throughput over seating. That format has changed developer behaviour because it fits neatly into pad-site logic. A landlord no longer needs every food-and-beverage user to behave like a traditional restaurant. Smaller kiosks and pre-fabricated boxes can absorb visible frontage, generate strong trip frequency, and create daily traffic without requiring a large building envelope.

Once those users become part of the mix, the site plan itself changes. The question is no longer whether a development can accommodate a drive-thru. It is whether circulation can support several of them without creating conflict between queues, parking aisles, delivery routes, and neighboring tenants. That is why stacking depth has become a design variable with real leasing consequences.

The landlord’s moat is internal circulation

A useful way to read recent project approvals is that local planning debates are increasingly about movement, not merchandising. In Danbury, Connecticut, for example, a plaza expansion approved in 2025 added two new drive-thrus, one for a bank and one for a fast-food user, with internal circulation becoming the central issue in the approval process. In Crescent City, California, an LRE development approved later in 2025 went further, combining a QSR building, two retail shop pads with drive-thru capability, and two additional drive-thru pads in a single scheme. Those are not isolated anecdotes. They show a growing comfort among landlords and municipalities with retail parks built around multiple queue-generating users.

That has two strategic implications. First, the landlord who solves circulation well can create a leasing moat that is difficult to replicate on older or more constrained sites. Second, poor internal design now carries a bigger downside because one problematic queue can impair the performance of several tenants rather than one.

A stronger rent story, with more operating complexity

For franchisors and multi-unit operators, this trend is attractive because clustered drive-thru environments can create mutual reinforcement. High-traffic coffee and beverage users validate the site for adjacent QSR brands, while landlords benefit from diversified rent streams and more frequent customer visits. Yet the model also raises the operating bar. Access points, lane length, menu-board placement, pickup choreography, and even neighboring peak periods start to influence store economics.

That is why this trend is more than a real estate tweak. It reflects a broader franchise-market preference for formats that are smaller, faster, and easier to replicate, especially when labor, construction costs, and consumer expectations all reward convenience. In many new retail parks, the anchor tenant has not disappeared. It has simply been replaced by a better question: how many high-turnover operators can this site carry before friction starts to destroy the value it was designed to create?