Garrick Brown, Vice President, Retail Research for the Americas at Cushman & Wakefieldand I meet up at Recon 2016 in Las Vegas. We’ve been hoping to meet up for years and finally got the opportunity.
In the first half of 2016, we’ve seen numerous retail closures, a trend that has come as a surprise to me as we continue to climb out of the great recession. There have been many, high profile retail closures, including those resulting from bankruptcies, such as Sports Authority and Sports Chalet as well as other retailers, including Macy’s, Penny’s, Sears, Aeropostale, Barnes and Noble and Office Depot/ Office Max, among others.
Garrick explains that going into 2016, he knew that Macy’s, with 30% of its sales coming from etail, was going to make some adjustments relating to their real estate locations. As a result of some high profile bankruptcies, in early 2016, wall street analysts opined that some of the large retailers weren’t going through their real estate downsizing fast enough. As a result, “there was immense pressure on Wall Street to ramp up its closures regardless of the consequences”.
The real questions are: (i) How are the landlords going to react; and (ii) are these closures going to affect class A properties.
Learn from Garrick how all of this is affecting retailers