What if you bought Simon Property (malls) in 1995?
Real estate · REIT. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play7.5× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Simon Property (malls) at the start of 1995 would be worth about $7,500 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Simon Property Group is the largest US owner of shopping malls and premium outlet centres, structured as a real estate investment trust that pays out most of its income as dividends. It went public in 1993 and grew through acquisitions, including Chelsea Property Group's outlet centres in 2004. Through the 2000s it was a stellar investment, surviving the financial crisis that pushed rival General Growth Properties into bankruptcy in 2009, and its shares peaked around 2015-2016.
Then came the retail apocalypse narrative: e-commerce, department-store closures and anchor-tenant bankruptcies made malls look like the next newspapers. The pandemic closed malls entirely in 2020 and the shares fell sharply, with Simon cutting its dividend. Simon responded by buying its own struggling tenants out of bankruptcy, including J.C. Penney and Forever 21, with partners, and by redeveloping empty department-store space. Its best properties kept filling up while weaker malls owned by others closed, and the shares recovered toward their old range. The share price chart understates returns, since a large part of the return came through dividends.
The lesson: Owning the best assets in a declining category is different from owning the category; quality allowed Simon to outlast the death-of-the-mall narrative.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $24.00 | $7,500 | $14,783 | 7.5× |
| 2000 | $23.00 | $7,826 | $4,626 | 7.8× |
| 2003 | $34.00 | $5,294 | $7,727 | 5.3× |
| 2005 | $63.00 | $2,857 | $5,763 | 2.9× |
| 2007 | $100 | $1,800 | $4,789 | 1.8× |
| 2008 | $88.00 | $2,045 | $4,626 | 2.0× |
| 2010 | $80.00 | $2,250 | $6,071 | 2.2× |
| 2012 | $130 | $1,385 | $5,312 | 1.4× |
| 2015 | $185 | $973 | $3,301 | 1.0× |
| 2018 | $170 | $1,059 | $2,519 | 1.1× |
| 2020 | $148 | $1,216 | $2,092 | 1.2× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $7,826. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Simon Property (malls) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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