"Of any mall" vs. "of any malls"

I am an English native speaker working with non-native English teachers. In one of our texts, we came across the following sentence:

ABC Mall has the most comprehensive loyalty rewards program of any malls in the area.

But to me, this doesn't seem correct. "of any mall" is more natural, but they state that "any" can go before plural nouns too. And while I agree, this depends on the sentence and the structure itself.

So, is "of any mall" correct? or "of any malls"? And why?

Solution 1:

I agree with you: I don't find it acceptable to use plural "malls" in "the most comprehensive loyalty rewards program of any malls in the area."

I think the problem with using "malls" is that the preceding noun "program" is singular, and any single program will be associated with only a single mall. It would make sense to say "ABC Mall and XYZ Mall have the most comprehensive loyalty rewards programs of any malls in the area." But when using the singular noun "program", it doesn't seem to work for me to switch to plural in the later part of this noun phrase.

I would say that Jim's suggested rephrasing "the most ... of any of the malls..." works fine because "any of the malls" is valid as a singular noun phrase.