Member spotlight: Researcher Meghann Martindale winds up at CBRE, where her career began

“I have always remained a champion of the company and still have many, many friends that work here,” said Martindale. “It feels as if my whole career has not only come full circle with my return, but [that] I’m taking all of my experience and rolling it up into this new position.”

In her new role Martindale works with the firm’s retail-practice professionals to generate in-depth research on the ongoing evolution of the industry. She also coordinates CBRE’s global research on retail. Martindale succeeds Melina Cordero, who was promoted last summer to managing director of retail capital markets.

Martindale is now an accomplished retail real estate professional — but got into the field almost on a whim. After graduating from Pepperdine University with a bachelor’s in humanities, she intended to break into the art-gallery and auction-house world. Instead, Martindale landed her first job at San Francisco’s Blatteis Realty Co., a brokerage firm specializing in retail leasing. She got hooked. “I just loved it out of the gate,” said Martindale, who hails from a residential real estate family but knew little about the world of retail real estate before joining Blatteis. Ironically, her first deal as a broker for Blatteis involved bringing an art gallery to San Francisco’s Union Square area.

“We all shop and dine and experience retail on a daily basis, but, unless you’re in the industry, few people realize what goes into creating stores — the place-making and the merchandising,” she said. “I found that creative expression that’s innate for me in the business side of retail real estate.”

In 2001 Martindale left Blatteis for a bigger platform, joining CBRE as a retail broker working in San Francisco’s central business district and in various neighborhood commercial districts. She soon took on a broader role as a landlord-and-tenant representative. She also became one of the youngest members of the firm’s inaugural Retail Advisory Council, a now-defunct board that had provided leadership and guidance on best practices for retail services.

“If I look at the trajectory of my career and the foundation upon which I’ve built everything else, it is undoubtedly having been at CBRE so early in my career,” said Martindale, noting that she not only honed her expertise in retail real estate but also cultivated valuable professional connections during that first stint at CBRE.

After leaving CBRE in early 2006, Martindale served in leasing roles at, chronologically, Terranomics Retail Services, Related Urban and Simon, where she was director of leasing until July 2017. She has also worked as a consultant and strategic adviser to large real estate firms and been an adjunct professor and guest lecturer at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

“I’ve been in the deal maker’s shoes. I’ve been in the client position. I can use all of that experience under the umbrella of this role,” said Martindale, who is overseeing research of an industry undergoing rapid change, as her CBRE predecessor did. One of her goals, she says, is to highlight some of the positive trends under way — from the emergence of new forms of in-store technology to the proliferation of health-and-wellness concepts.

“We are all navigating incredibly dynamic times in the industry,” she said. “While we know there is a lot of negative, there is also a lot of positive change happening. We want to be the voice of that to help our clients and empower our own teams.”

What are some of the biggest issues Martindale plans to explore through research? Not surprisingly, leasing is among them. More specifically, she and her colleagues plan to examine how the metrics for measuring store success are changing in the omni-channel world, and the related evolution of traditional leasing structures.

“Historically, a store’s purpose was simple: To showcase a product that customers purchased in-store and took home with them,” said Martindale. Today, however, brick-and-mortar stores also serve as fulfillment centers for e-commerce sales and as consumer-data collection points, she notes. And they tend to have a halo effect too — that is to say, they typically have a positive effect on Web traffic and sales in any given market.

“Leasing used to be a fairly one-size-fits-all formula where you could easily roll out standardized tenant deals across a portfolio,” Martindale said. “You could look at comps, sales projections and occupancy to carve out a deal. Now you have to look at many different elements and methods of evaluating both the value of the space and how to measure tenant performance.”

Martindale and her colleagues will also build on previous CBRE research into the so-called “credit versus cool” issue: In response to changing consumer demands, many shopping center landlords are taking risks with new and untested brands; this trend raises all sorts of questions, beginning with how to strike the right balance between “credit” tenants (national retailers with a solid track record of driving foot traffic) and the fledgling “cool” brands, Martindale says.

Retail is also being reshaped by new demographic forces,  including the growing buying power of single women and members of Generation Z (the cohort that came after the Millennials), says Martindale, who also plans to explore these issues through research. By 2030, nearly half of all prime-working-age women (between 25 and 44) in the U.S. will be single, the largest proportion in history, according to a Morgan Stanley study titled Rise of the SHEconomy.

Indeed, Martindale has no shortage of topics to tackle these days, and she feels well-equipped to do that. “This role,” she said, “seems like the perfect culmination of everything I’ve done in my career.”