Operationally, the business is sound. There are three segments (apart from corporate): core office, core retail, and opportunistic real estate.
In the retail segment, occupancy consistently kept around 96% in the last 5 years and only declined to 94.6% after the recent GGP acquisition.
Tenant sales per square foot have increased every year, from $511 in 2012 to $587 in 2017. Same-store NOI growth was also positive every year, usually above 4% (at constant currency). This growth has slowed down to 1.6% in 2017 and 2018.
The management is careful to point out that malls are not all created equal and that value of some of them consists chiefly in their location, not the actual buildings. Consequently, pure-play mall operators without sufficient access to large-scale capital (especially capital whose cost that does not depend on market prices) might be in trouble.
Recently, BPY has acquired GGP, which seem to provide them with an almost endless runway for redeveloping, densifying, and adding mixed use to high-quality malls across the U. S.
Albeit there are some clouds gathering over most of the retail shopping centers over the U. S., Brookfield Property Partners owns in large part those that appear insulated from major deterioration and they are actively working on getting rid of the rest of them. (And mind you, not in a fire sale; they are quite patient and actually plan to do minor redevelopments and stabilization before selling.) In addition, they have sound mixed-use redevelopment plans for those that do not perform very well, but are in attractive locations.
As for the question of poor performance of BPY, it was definitely not the operational performance in Core Retail: same-store NOI growth rate was positive every year, often above 4%.
[1] What Went Wrong With Brookfield Property Partners [From Internet, accessed on 2018]
What Went Wrong With Brookfield Property Partners (Part 1): Core Retail - Brookfield Property Partners L.P. (NYSE:BPY) | Seeking Alpha
