A newsletter at the intersection of retail and commercial real estate
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I walked into a Nordstrom Rack recently, and a large chunk of the front of the store was sealed off. It wasn't a remodel or a pop-up. It was boxes, stacked and waiting for pickup customers. That space is still in the denominator of the store'
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In 2024 the average American household spent $1,993 on vehicle insurance and $1,985 on all apparel and services combined. Shoes, coats, work clothes, school clothes, alterations, dry cleaning, the whole category. Car insurance edged it out by eight dollars. That number comes from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey,
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Only 18% of millennials say they can confidently read a paper map. For adults over 39, it is 44%. Ordnance Survey, the agency that has mapped Britain for more than two centuries, ran the survey, and the number underneath the headline is the one that stays with me: about one
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Walk the floor at any industry conference this year and do the subtraction. Count the AI booths. Then try to remember which ones were there last year, and go look up what happened to them. Some got acquired. Some got quiet. Some are still selling the same demo with a
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Where location intelligence goes blind, and why the dataset built to fix it needs a careful hand, especially in the white and gray areas. Every foot traffic platform can show you a store dying, one quiet month at a time. None of them can tell you what to build in
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In May I moderated a session at ICSC Las Vegas called "The End of the Trade Area" with Meghann Martindale of Avison Young, Ethan Chernovsky of Placer.ai, and Sam Hall of Growth Factor. The premise was blunt: the radius-based trade area is a 60-year-old
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Retail real estate is having a victory lap. Vacancy near historic lows. Rents up. J.P. Morgan talking about the strongest shopping center valuations in a decade. Landlords are taking bows. Here's my problem with the celebration: a lot of it isn't earned. Yes. This is
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Same macro environment. Same interest rate cycle. Same headlines. Opposite outcomes, depending on whose balance sheet you're looking at. Ask anyone outside this industry what happened to American retail last year and you'll get the same answer: it contracted. Joann liquidated. Party City liquidated. Rite Aid
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The most important word in CRE right now isn't AI. It's place. It's always been place. Let me explain how I arrived at that conclusion, and why it took a trip to Las Vegas to remind me. I just came back from ICSC. Two
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Why an industry built on the Power of Where has confused data with understanding, and what it costs the people making real decisions. Walk into any commercial real estate strategy session, retail planning meeting, or lender review. You will see a heatmap. It will be beautiful. It pulses with reds
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Here's a pattern nobody's naming. A VP of Real Estate or a CRO gets hired. They inherit a data stack. They spend four months learning what the platforms do, which ones to trust, which reports matter. Somewhere around month six, they start asking the right questions.
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Sit through enough data vendor demos in #CRE and you start to notice something. Every dataset is "proprietary." Every platform has a "unique edge." Every company is the only one who can give you "this view of the market." Funny thing - pull back the