A newsletter at the intersection of retail and commercial real estate
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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
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Every conference. Every pitch deck. Every vendor demo. The message is the same: AI will save you. Faster decisions. Smarter insights. Automated everything. The hype is real. And honestly? Some of it is more than deserved. AI is transforming how we work. But here's what nobody wants to
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Retail Success Is a Chain Reaction. Data Tells You Where the Links Are Breaking. I've been saying for a while now that "experiential retail" has become one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in the retail industry. The brands that succeed don't just
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A few months ago, I wrote about how traditional trade area analysis is dead. Radius rings and demographic overlays can't capture the micro-market dynamics that actually drive retail performance. But here's what I've been thinking about since: if AI and dynamic location analytics
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The Rise of Prediction Markets as a CRE and Retail Data Source The CRE industry has traditionally relied on a familiar forecasting toolkit: historical sales data, comps, macroeconomic models, demographic data, and good old-fashioned gut instinct. That has changed recently with the introduction of more refined persona data, mobile