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 ...

06/26/2017 | By John Cumbelich

The internet has been described as The Great Disruptor – a name that those of us in retail have no trouble appreciating. And it’s true that retail sales have been moving away from traditional stores and toward online shopping at an increasing pace. Yet ...

05/02/2017 | By John Cumbelich

Imagine spending exactly 48 hours with the same group of 500 people, once a year for thirty years. Imagine that in your first year you are twenty two years old, single, broke, fresh out of college and ready to take on the world.  You’re frightened ...

03/20/2017 | By John Cumbelich

The Department Store business model is dead. Macy’s and JC Penney are closing stores by the hundreds. Sears is on the verge of extinction. Mervyns and Gottschalks are bankrupt. Lest we think that these travails are only affecting the mid-tier brands, let us consider the ...