International Council of Shopping Centers

We're dancing around.

We all wanna meet at ICSC, so we'll see what happens there.

Ah.

[laughs] Okay.

Well, I can understand completely.

Well, I look forward to seeing how that comes together.

I, you know, a lot of those brokers may be going to ICSC anyway, so, uh, why not meet there and have a little collaboration and see what happens from there?

Absolutely.

Right.

And so just kind of figure out, um, Like I went to ICSC in New York a couple weeks ago.

And so I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

And so I think at the moment, I'm sending out letters and mailers to multifamily and kind of similar assets that I've purchased.

You know, it's funny.

I was, it was at ICSC this year and I spoke on a panel and then we got like our panel photo.

It had all these like logos in the background.

I'm like, well, that's no good.

And by the way, it shows you that our expectation of what does and does not belong in these spaces is very often incorrect.

Oh, I remember, gosh, it was years ago.

I think I was on some ICSC trip and we were in Indianapolis.

And not only did Nordstrom say that they would never close and they did like a year later, but that's besides the point.

The school is in-house.

We have an ICSC school, which is the only school in India which caters to football.

That means we revolve it around football.

Okay.

I certainly never thought of that, but I think I could have leaned more.

And I'd say get involved earlier in things like ULI and ICSC.

Um, and your relationships are everything.

Um, you know, I think maybe sometimes I thought just doing great work was enough, you know, and I think it's both and relationships.

The great part about Retail Guys is we deal with the same people year in, year out, decade in, decade out.

So if you get started and you have to join the ICSC, the International Conference of Shopping Centers, once you get in the business and you start attending all the conferences and you learn everything, your area and you learn who the players are, you're going to work with them over and over again.

And so, yeah, I have a distinct advantage over you two.

If we were all going to be out looking at centers, we could all see the same center and I could say, aha, There's this vacancy and this tenant is weak.

And...

I hope to see Dora Mondami at the ICSC New York show.

And I think it's going to be interesting to see the reaction to this inside these large metro.

I think the competitive dynamics seem pretty isolated.

Tom was one of two speakers at a recent webinar that highlighted findings from the report titled Shopping in the Age of AI: Redefining Stores for a New Era.

That report, which is available on mckinsey.com, was a collaboration between McKinsey and ICSC.

The other speaker at the webinar was Colleen Baum, a McKinsey senior partner, who is one of the authors of the report.

And in today's episode, you get to hear excerpts from the webinar.

And we both research retail and real estate for JLL.

So today we're recording live from the JLL booth at ICSC Las Vegas 2026.

Welcome to the show, Jay.

Thank you very much.