Sandy Sigal wasn’t a real estate person who found technology, Sandy was a tech person who found real estate.
The co-founder and CEO of the Calabasas, Calif.-based NewMark Merrill Companies–which owns and operates 80-plus open-air shopping centers in California, Colorado, Illinois, and Washington—was not the heir of a family-owned real estate dynasty. He was a personal computer whiz kid during the dawn of the PC who, at the age of 12, was already programming and developing accounting and project management software for local companies.
After graduating college at age 20, Sigal was hired by West Venture Companies, a California-based homebuilder, to computerize their business processes. He ended up as the company’s CEO, left it to start NewMark Merrill, and purchased West Venture’s retail assets, which consisted of 15 centers and four projects under development.
“One of the first great tools we found was Datex, which tracks percentage rent payments for all retail classes and top national retailers,” Sigal said. “We could check that data to see who’s late with rent, who’s paying on time, where rents were below market. That enabled us to do trend analyses when we were looking to buy a center.”
NewMark Merrill subsequently acquired Datex.
NewMark Merill was also the first developer to use Placer.ai. Some seven years ago, Placer.ai’s co-founder Noam Ben-Zvi, who’s based in California, paid a visit to Sigal to see if he thought the company’s mobile-based location analytics platform could provide a valuable service to retail real estate developers and expanding retailers.
He did, and invited Ben-Zvi to join him at NewMark Merrill’s booth at the next ICSC show to introduce it to attendees.
Today, Placer.ai’s ICSC show booth is twice as big as NewMark Merill’s.
“What’s really great is that tenants now use the same tools that we use, including Placer. Now we are all looking at the same data. We ask a lot more questions, and they’re a lot more smart,” Sigal said. “What tenants do we renew? Who’s strong and who’s weak? We can isolate the locations where they succeed and where they fail.”
Sigal says that the good news about new real estate tech tools is that they give their users very accurate information about what’s really going on. The bad news, he added, is that there are always users who maintain a slight edge.
Following is a review of some of the top real estate tech tools being used by both landlords and tenants in the retail sphere.
CBRE RETAIL ANALYTICS
Ten years ago, CBRE acquired Forum Analytics and became the first global real estate services giant to offer machine learning-based data to retailers on national expansion potential, top markets, and shopping zone profiling.
One prime tool from the Forum product lineup that has been relied upon greatly by retail real estate directors is its ShopoGraphics Retail Zones, which quickly serves up center profiles with information that speeds up the targeting process.
Overhead maps outline center locations on Google maps with cogent details that can quickly ID a property as a no-go, a maybe, or a sure thing. One-word center vitality ratings, store counts, and local car traffic levels paint a clear picture of the property–as do nicknames such as “Keep on Truckin” and “Bargain Basement in the ‘Burbs.”
“Where machine-learning works really, really well is in building and defining these shopping clusters that truly aid expansion targeting,” said Tony Conti, the senior VP of CBRE’s Retail Analytics.
“When users dig deeper into possible new locations,” Conti added, “we’ll give them more detailed information about customers, tenant staffing, key competitors, and more.”
Unlike most other players in the retail analytics industry, CBRE sits on a treasure trove of data that it can glean from the 50-plus mall, mixed-use, lifestyle and grocery-anchored centers it serves as a third-party manager.
CBRE Retail Analytics also offers sales maturity curves at potential centers, customer transfer, cannibalization, and competitors and co-tenants at centers being reviewed.
“A lot of the data used by other players in this business has been commoditized,” said Conti. “We pride ourselves in our analytics.”
JLL’S VISIONARY INSIGHTS GROUP
In 2001, economic geography expert Paul Sill—a one-time researcher in Blockbuster Entertainment’s real estate department–started a company called Forum Analytics that created mapping solutions for businesses powered by modeling and analytics. Forum Analytics has long served as a standard tool used by brands as diverse as McDonald’s, Tiffany & Company, Sephora, Ace Hardware, and Domino’s Pizza.
During the dawn of the AI revolution, Forum Analytics introduced numerous industry-changing platforms–most notably the Strategic Integrated Mapping and Modelling System (SIMMS), Cannibalytics, and Shopographics
Ten years ago, Sill sold Forum Analytics to CBRE and became an adjunct professor of geography at Chicago’s DePaul University. But, last year, he jumped back into the software-as-a-service business to head up of CBRE’s new Visionary Insights Group.
to retail brands we made with Forum Analytics—less is more,” Sill said. “So many solutions on the market are packed with too much information. The real value we will bring to clients is helping them focus on eight to 10 essential variables. It’s one piece of paper. We think that’s a better way. A lot of the solutions available today are just too much data to process.”
Sill spent most of the past year putting his Visionary Insights Group team together. Now the platform is staffed and primed and ready to go to market.
“We will strive to provide clients with patterns and data that will validate boots on the ground,” said Sill. “Finding the best real estate has to be done on both sides of that fence.”
BUXTON
Buxton, like Esri, has been a mainstay data provider to the retail real estate industry for more than three decades. Unlike many of the newer companies that have come into this space, however, Buxton continues to rely on third-party and sales performance customer data purchased from aggregators, not first-party data that’s been collected by brands they serve.
“There’s so much data available today that it doesn’t require us to get it directly from the brands,” said Buxton’s senior VP of product Phillip Crow. “We collect sales performance data week-over-week and day-over-day.”
Buxton’s location intelligence offerings to brands include analyses on site selection, location optimization, market optimization, and mapping and reporting.
“Historically, what we do is look at the customers that brands attract at their existing locations and compare them to the types of customers they attract at their lesser-performing locations,” said Crow. “We then dig into those variables to evaluate potential new sites that mirror the ingredients of their best locations.”
Buxton then provides clients with roadmaps—for specific cities or DMAs—that show them how many locations pair up performance-wise with their best existing stores.
“We are using AI to study consumers visiting a brand’s locations based on several different attributes. Once we’ve identified their key attributes, we share the findings with the brand,” said Crow. “We also use this information to venture into the marketing realm, sharing customers’ unique personal information and what they buy.”
“Tenants now use the same tools that we use. Now we are all looking at the same data. We ask a lot more questions, and they’re a lot more smart.” – Sandy Sigal, CEO, NewMark Merrill Companies
PLACER.AI
Just six years ago, retail real estate developers and their leasing organizations would put up maps with their malls in the center, overlain with three concentric circles identifying their two-, five-, and 10-mile market areas. The key-customer dartboard.
Then Placer.ai showed up.
Using mobile phone data from a sample of thirty million people nationwide, Placer was able to identify a retail center visitor’s demographic information, shopping preferences, and ZIP codes. It could analyze their visitation trends at local, state, and national levels to compare center and store performance versus their competitors, informing the growth strategies of both retailers and developers. It could track changes in customer behavior following promotional events and store remodelings.
Placer.ai color-mapping could also identify organically shaped zones where a mall’s key customers lived, many of them snaking well outside of the perfectly round circles on developers’ maps. Their dartboards were taken down and stored in their closets for good.
“We came into this industry not really knowing what retail real estate was,” said Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s senior VP of marketing. “But we got lucky with a few first customers and found that the industry was very receptive to new ideas.”
Those first few customers have burgeoned into 4,000. After the pandemic subsided, Chernofsky observed that retailers and developers began to steer clear of their hunches and rely on data-backed strategies moving forward.
“This sector is so unique because we have an ongoing conversation with customers that allows us to develop things that they really need,” Chernofsky said. “They’ll ask what do we need to build and where? How can we execute it all? In what markets can we do better than we’re doing? There’s a joy in their commitment. Conversations happen openly.
“As for us,” he added, “we strive to retain the humility to understand what we don’t know in order to stay on the game.”
SITERISE
Are you a project manager for a big national brand retail chain with several new locations going up in five or six regions and regional managers sending you weekly updates on leases and project timelines via local or cloud spreadsheets? And are you climbing up a wall right now?
Dillon Okner, a former retail construction manager at Apple, was just like you, shuffling weekly reports filed individually like playing cards and praying that he would be able to close his deliverables gaps efficiently and on schedule. Rarely did any full houses turn up.
Today, Okner is a founding partner of SiteRise, an online platform used by all of a brand’s regional construction managers, who log drawings, leases, documents, and timeline updates in real time– eliminating siloed data reporting across development teams and giving them instant updates on how projects are progressing cross-region.
“At Apple, we had five real estate directors, each one with his or her own file format for how they reported every week,” Okner said. “Our goal at SiteRise was to finally eliminate siloed data across development teams and create a new standard for portfolio management.”
Okner founded SiteRise because he felt that local or cloud spreadsheets were not built to efficiently communicate redevelopment timelines. Its dashboard is customized with reporting categories such as RFIs, change orders, and punch lists.
“When you have a unified system in place, it gives your whole team confidence,” noted Okner. “One hundred percent of retailers say every department is siloed. With SiteRise, if the architect makes some changes in the design, everyone knows immediately that a change has been made. If you’re building out a gym space and the standard number of treadmills won’t fit in it, purchasing is immediately made aware of it.”
Keeping track of budget updates makes buildouts complex, so SiteRise includes a budgeting tool that allows changes to be noted by headquarters and all on the construction teams.
“In traditional lease management, if there’s a change, I’m marking it up with my pen,” Okner said. “With SiteRise, you can do that in the tool natively. If you’re the boss and want to see how a project’s tracking, everything you need to know lives in there.”
Article by Al Urbanski for CSA: The Business of Retail
Read the original article here: https://issuu.com/ensembleiq/docs/csa_march_april_2025/34