Retail Trends & How to Have Successful Pop Ups in Your Center

What are some retail trends that may not be so obvious today? Why should you add a retail component to your multi-family project? How to host a successful popup in your center? Edie Weintraub, Founder and Managing Director of Terra Alma, shares her insights.We all know that retail is changing. It's a lot more service-oriented today and it will be even more moving forward as people want to buy things online. I don't want to buy my shoes at the store, because they don't have the selection and I don't want to try all of them at the store and have the guy go and come back with the shoes. It's a trend that I think commerce is not going to be there when you work with owners. How do you help them have a diverse amount of service providers so that they will all work with each other well in terms of what they provide so they are all thriving in that center?We evaluate the local community and understand what's missing. If there's already an Italian restaurant in the market, we don't want to step on anybody's toes. The worst thing to have is a new shopping center or a new downtown walkable community, and immediately the first thing that pops up is a duplication of what's already there. We take the time to get to know what the community is asking for, attend local meetings, and talk about economic development. It is common for us to stop people on the street and say, "Hey, we're going to be working on a project that's coming up, and we want your input" because the more the community feels like they are part of the process, the more they're going to welcome the project with open arms. We've had conversations on behalf of multifamily developers to say, "Let us go and work for the community early" because if we can do an activation or a pop up or a farmer's market on the site before you build, chances are we can get goodwill from the community and they will be excited for us to potentially capture some of those vendors from the farmers market and put them in a permanent space. There's nothing worse than someone coming in from outside and saying, "My Italian is better than your Italian" and that's not a good way to garner goodwill when you're coming into a new community.That is so brilliant about the popups. Can you elaborate on how they work because sometimes water is involved and all of that? Which effort would it take from the owner of the property for these popups?It depends on how much time we have because at the very beginning, you've probably got a property under contract, and you need to go through the approval process. We're working with the current owner of the property and not our future client that's going through the approval process. It is up to the current owner if they are receptive to dealing with us and letting us activate it so that there is positive momentum. It could be something as easy as a shipping container park, it could be a food truck park and those investments are picnic tables, maybe there's existing space on the property that we can leverage bathrooms for, or it just might be a farmer's market where we're not necessarily providing bathrooms, but just creating a gathering space that people can come out on, and you can activate it on something as small as half an acre or an acre, but it just depends on what that timeline is.A lot of the folks that we work with on the multifamily side and helping to advise them on the retail component are leaning in the direction of having anywhere from 12 to 25,000 square feet of retail and that is a good critical mass. We're going to assess what else is in the community and hopefully be able to leverage and be respectful of what's there. But if we're coming in and there's nothing around us within a 10-minute drive, 25,000 is that magic number that we would like to see in terms of retail component. Edie...