How a parking lot shootout changed my thoughts on site selection
Many years ago when I was running Walmart’s digital brand portfolio, I opened a store in Lenox Square in Atlanta that had all the right things:
Large e-commerce customer base in the market
A customer base that wanted to shop at Lenox Square per a survey we sent
Attractive co-tenants, generating strong volumes: Apple, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus
Fair rents and an available space
We signed the deal and moved on. If these other great brands opened here and succeeded, why can’t we?
But we missed something
Within just weeks, if not days, there were multiple reports of shootouts in the parking lot.
After asking the store team what was going on, they mentioned that it was “a known thing that this isn’t the safest place”. Trip Advisor reviews even commonly refer to this:
I was angry at myself for not knowing about this, and pissed no one told me about it beforehand.
Most of all, I was amazed at the industry dynamics that let this happen
The broker and leasing agents are not incentivized to share bad information like this: it’d jeopardize the likelihood of the deal closing and getting their commissions.
The landlord is not incentivized to share this for obvious reasons.
And while this results in the (fair) responsibility of the tenant to do their research, when such prominent retailers were already operating there it’s just not something you’d think to do.
I still fault myself for this miss, but it also really irks me that we have to put that onus on the brand to know which wild concerns to look into. We don’t know what we don’t know!
So I built a solution: the Real Estate Collective!
Glassdoor solved a similar problem. Before it’s launch, new hires didn’t know what they didn’t know.
And that usually meant unknowingly agreeing to unfair compensation or joining a toxic team or company.
But now, Glassdoor is the go-to platform to find and share insights that you might not otherwise think to ask beforehand.
1REC is now doing the same for retail destinations to help future prospective tenants at least know what they’re getting into, even if that doesn’t actually change the outcome.
Would I still have opened in Lenox Square knowing what I know today? Probably. But at least with this kind of insight I could have negotiated for stronger security requirements, and/or prepared my team for what we’re getting ourselves into.
We’re starting with NYC, and would love your feedback, ratings, and reviews on destinations you know about!
