11/12/2018 | By John Cumbelich

Prior to World War II, Oakland was one of the major retailing markets in the West. In an era when the department store was the king of retail, serving as the ultimate validation of a retail marketplace, downtown Oakland was home to R.H. Macy’s, ...

08/14/2018 | By John Cumbelich

Way back in the 1980’s, I developed my first really important and impactful client relationship. My client Larry worked for a fast-growing Fortune 500 video store retailer. He was in the fourth quarter of a career in corporate real estate that had begun in ...

05/16/2018 | By John Cumbelich

The real estate industry’s version of online dating can be found in places with names like LoopNet, Crexi, Commercial Search, CoStar and others.  These sites are built on the titillating premise of helping unlucky buyers and sellers, or landlords and tenants, to find the ...

04/25/2018 | By John Cumbelich

In the past month or so, our firm has consummated leases with fitness brands CB Fit, Omni Fitness, F45 Fitness and The Studio. Over the same short period of time, we have also had discussions about current availabilities with Core Power Yoga, Orange Theory ...

03/12/2018 | By John Cumbelich

The world of retail lost an inimitable icon last week with the passing of Russ Solomon, the founder of Tower Records, at his home in Sacramento. While Solomon was well known to the worlds of music, retail and real estate for achievements and innovations ...

03/06/2018 | By John Cumbelich

First the old news:  Department stores are departing; Facebook has replaced the mall as our national hangout; and Amazon and its peers are where people now go to satisfy their shopping fix. These changes are taking a heavy and well documented toll on the ...

02/22/2018 | By John Cumbelich

America’s inventory of shopping centers is ominously overbuilt.  Even if the migration of retail sales to the internet had not brought chronic overbuilding into sharp relief like it has, pre-recession overbuilding created a distorted ratio of retail space to consumers in the US.  By ...

08/02/2017 | By John Cumbelich

A friend recently called and asked me to meet after work at a bar. I was pleased to comply, because there’s a great bar in a nice restaurant right across the street from our office. Such a request used to be so straightforward. No thinking ...