Representation across the lease.
Three practice areas, applied across waterfront, mixed-use, and high-street assets. We represent owners of destination retail, guide national and emerging brands on site selection and expansion, and counsel landlords on landmark properties under repositioning. Senior attention, the operator's perspective, and the discretion the work demands.
Curating the tenants that make the place.
For owners, the engagement covers the entire arc of leasing: positioning the asset, identifying and pursuing the right tenant prospects, and negotiating leases that protect both rent roll and merchandising integrity over a ten-year horizon. We work across waterfront, mixed-use, and high-street properties, and across owner types: institutional landlords, developers in pre-leasing, public agencies, and the owners of landmark properties that don't fit conventional categories.
What ties the engagements together is one conviction: the right tenant in the right space is the difference between square footage leased and a destination people return to. What separates the work is the operator's perspective. Our principal built and ran a multi-merchant retail concept before her career leasing destination properties nationally. We read prospects the way an operator reads them: not just for what they'll pay, but for what they'll perform, what they'll attract alongside them, and what they'll add to the place over time. The work isn't to fill a center. It's to curate a mix that holds up.
Where to land, and how to grow.
For brands, the engagement spans the immediate location decision and the longer-arc expansion strategy: market entry, site selection and tour, lease negotiation, and the roadmap for brands moving from one location to many. We work with national brands entering or scaling in Southern California, and with emerging concepts looking for the right place to open their first or next door. The brief is always the same: find sites that have the right rent and the right neighbors, the right foot traffic and the right place character for the brand to perform over the long term.
The operator's perspective matters more on the tenant side than people expect. A good site for a brand isn't just one with foot traffic and a fair lease. It's one where the surrounding tenants are pulling the same kind of visitor, where the place identity matches the brand identity, and where the brand can become part of the neighborhood rather than a temporary occupant. We've sat on the operator's side of the lease. We know what makes a brand work in a place, not just what makes a place available.
Strategy for the harder cases.
This is the work that begins before the leases. Sometimes before the property is even acquired. Advisory engagements cover acquisition due diligence on retail assets, pre-leasing strategy for new developments, repositioning plans for underperforming centers, and the merchandising vision that has to be set before construction or capital commitments begin. Most of these engagements share one trait: the path forward isn't obvious. A landlord owns a center that's lost its identity. A developer is acquiring a mixed-use parcel and needs the retail thesis before the architect starts. A public agency holds a waterfront asset that needs both a coherent tenant mix and a place narrative the community will recognize.
The conventional answer of filling the GLA at market rents doesn't work, because the work is to define what the place should be, not just how it should be leased. That's where the operator's perspective is most useful. A retailer-turned-broker reads property the way a retailer reads a location: by what could happen here, not just what's already happening. Repositioning is a judgment problem before it's a leasing problem. Our job is to bring the judgment first, then execute the leasing strategy that follows.
Across both sides of the lease.
