From 36,609 ft @ 450 mph (headed towards LAS)
Graffito, as it exists today, remains a work in progress – it will be so forever. But one thing is for sure, it’s become increasingly a team effort. And collectively as we chart our path forward one thing remains from our earliest days — part of our core competency is leasing retail space for our clients. And it’s this part of our business that I am most proud of. Proud of Dave, who leads our leasing practice, and proud of Sean, who has become one of the best retail brokers I’ve ever worked with.
From the very start, our retail brokerage work has been fueled by our strong belief that the best neighborhoods and communities contain a high concentration of small, local, owner-operated businesses. This sentiment is unwavering, and I feel more strongly about it today than ever before. And for this reason, we’ve always sort of existed outside of the scene of the traditional (and often institutional) brokerage world that is largely focused on tenants with national footprints (or aspirations for such), suburban big box deals, and more formulaic transactions.
For the last decade, we have been focused squarely on urban projects, developing relationships with best in class local tenants, and keeping in touch with emerging trends in the industry that often are not at the forefront of discussion. This approach is one of the reasons our clients come to us and we have developed a reputation for being the best firm in the region at translating between large (often global) real estate investors and hyper-local tenants. And it’s because of this central focus/competency I’ve never prioritized the need to participate in national tradeshows and industry gatherings (yes, they exist in this business, big time); the biggest of such being an annual event in Las Vegas that attracts thousands of real estate professionals from across the country…
Yet here I sit on a plane to Vegas, full of familiar faces from the industry, to attend said event: “RECon – The Global Retail Real Estate Convention”, the largest annual event of ICSC (International Council of Shopping Centers)…
And I’m excited. Excited for a handful of interesting meetings and events but most importantly excited to understand how this event can add value to our business, our client’s businesses, and make us better retail brokers. And, generally, make us a bit smarter at all the non-brokerage retail planning and strategy work we do.
So I’ve got an action-packed three days lined up ahead in Las Vegas. I touch down at LAS in about 2 hours and I’ll be posting to GSP’s Instagram account throughout. And I’ll draft another post here after the trip sharing my sentiments and related thoughts, which I look forward to sharing. Back to you then.
May 21, 2017 10:41 pm /
Sounds very impressive. Have a great trip.