Retail leasing agents’ role could involve nonretail tenants, says JLL’s new U.S. retail lead

JLL has named Chris Wilson head of national retail agency leasing, a new position geared toward building a stronger platform to serve institutional retail clients. Wilson began working with JLL five years ago, after selling his own brokerage to the firm, and he has since built up JLL’s Southwest agency leasing teams. This new role is a natural fit for Wilson, who emphasized agency leasing when he launched his Los Angeles–based brokerage in 1990. Ultimately, the 35-year retail real estate veteran says he aims to quadruple JLL’s agency leasing revenue by 2025. Here Wilson speaks with contributing editor Joe Gose.

How would you characterize the role of retail leasing given today’s uncertain retail property climate?

This country is over-retailed, and we’re going to be converting or partially converting some retail to different uses. JLL is very fortunate to have strong partners in the medical, office, multifamily and capital-markets fields. One of my tasks is to ensure that our people are leveraging those partners as they think about solutions surrounding the retail property. Our job is to fix assets, and filling a retail vacancy with another retailer may not be the answer.

Are landlords receptive to bringing in nonretail uses?

For institutional owners with a vacant box, the first choice and the path of least resistance, [with] the least cost and the least downtime, is to find another retailer, but that game is over. The well-capitalized multimarket owners understand that change is happening and [they] are evaluating all solutions. Even so, owners are still making darn sure that there’s not a viable retail user that can backfill the space first.

What are the challenges in agency leasing today, and how do you plan to address them?

One of my first goals is to teach people the benefit of scale and leverage. We want deep teams servicing clients up and down the ladder, from our broker coordinators to the top leaders consulting with those clients. We have outstanding agency teams, experienced team leadership and a very strong group of motivated and ambitious brokers in many major markets in the nation, but the teams often aren’t very deep, so a key initiative is to strengthen our teams to better serve our clients. Recruiting and training will be a key priority for us, and we want to make sure we’re leveraging JLL’s technologies, JLL’s marketing and JLL’s research to the furthest extent possible, and [that we] are applying the knowledge properly.

What are your priorities as head of JLL’s national agency leasing team?

Our business development is going to concentrate on working with multimarket owners of real estate and applying best practices to those relationships. But one of the things I immediately started to do is export the way we’ve done business with our clients in Southern California to the rest of our agency teams around the country. That will allow our teams to better source the active owners of retail real estate in their markets and then execute for them.