A newsletter at the intersection of retail and commercial real estate
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Let’s start with a simple idea: Information isn’t scarce anymore...Attention is. We don’t live in a knowledge economy. We live in an attention economy. Online, everything is designed to grab your focus: * Platforms push outrage over nuance * Brands chase clicks over connection * Politics rewards extremes over
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One of the unexpectedly viral series of posts this year for me has been the Nostalgic Retail and Nostalgic Restaurant Series. These have been fun to do, have brought back successful strategies, questionable decisions, failed leadership, and most of all....brand attachment that we all had to many of these
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I decided to dig into the history and theory of site selection, wanting to write about it, but with brevity (and not with the old "walking though 5 miles of snow to get to school attitude). Site selection has significantly evolved over the years...part due to economic development
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In Commercial Real Estate, data used to be scarce, proprietary, and hard to access. Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. We are awash in information: geospatial data, foot traffic data, building sensor data, hyperlocal demographic and persona data, transaction data, crime and employment data, sophisticated predictive models
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In the commercial real estate industry, data-driven decision-making has become essential. Among the various data sources available, mobile location data (MLD) has emerged as a powerful tool, but one that requires careful understanding and application. I talked about this many years ago, not long after this data became
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Back in 2022, I did a presentation where I started to touch on the idea that sales per square foot was no longer a good measure of retailer performance (and don't judge on the slide format - I was in my "dark mode mood" back then) Fast
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Why Retail Must Rethink Generational Stereotypes There's a fundamental shift happening in how we understand consumers, and it's forcing retail and commercial real estate to evolve beyond traditional demographic segmentation. The Perennial Mindset Gina Pell introduced the concept of "Perennials" in 2016: Individuals of
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I have heard a lot lately about both data fatigue and disparate data in #CRE. The former relates to the industry being swamped with data and trying to make sense of the noise. The latter comes once you decide on the data you need (a feat in itself), and none
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For decades, retail real estate professionals have leaned on trade area analysis as a compass for site selection, portfolio strategy, and market forecasting. Draw a circle around a store location, count the rooftops, layer in some demographic data, and voilà, instant insight. But today, that map is outdated and will
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If AI feels like the latest buzzword in commercial real estate, you’re not wrong. It's been the main topic at almost every conference, meeting, social gathering that I have been to for most of 2024 and 2025. AI is definitely more than just hype. It is already
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Commercial Real Estate's Decision Paralysis in 2025 The commercial real estate industry entered 2025 in a state of cautious limbo. After several years of turbulence, market participants find themselves caught between conflicting signals— positive economic indicators on one hand and persistent uncertainties on the other. This hesitation is
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What Is a Third Place? The concept of the "third place" was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place to describe social environments that are distinct from home (the "first place") and work (the "second place")—settings where