Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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president of real estate at Ralphs Gro- cery Co. And in a return to develop- ment, for about five years she was senior vice president of leasing and acquisitions at Caruso Affiliated Hold- ings, where she added new assets to the portfolio and leased up the likes of The Commons at Calabasas (Calif.) and The Grove, in Los Angeles. To- day, with 10 of her own retail projects either planned or already under con- struction, Yavitz says she feels grate- ful for her years in retail. "It makes us more competitive as a developer," she said. "When you understand what the retailer needs and try to make their job easier, they want to come back and do another project with you." Likewise, it helps to know how re- tailers' real estate processes function and to have firsthand knowledge of some of the specific challenges retail- ers tend to face, says Yavitz. She cites packages of site-related paperwork that are so huge they can take a week to put together and ship to a corporate office and which typically require lots of time for real estate executives to sift through. "You have to remember, the real estate part of a retail company is so minute," Yavitz said. "At Ralphs, out of 25,000 employees, there were only two of us doing real estate." As a result of this in- side knowledge, Yavitz knows to be a bit skeptical when retailers promise to secure site approvals in, say, four weeks. "It will more likely take four months," she said. Bob Champion, founder of Los Angeles–based Champion Real Estate Co., spent years rolling out franchise ice-cream stores across Southern California before his transition to develop- ment. Champion, whose company has completed retail, mixed- use and other projects valued at roughly $1 billion in total, was just 19 when he bought his first Swensen's Ice Cream shop in Long Beach, Calif. Later, as a student at Menlo College, he took a part-time job in Swensen's real estate department, where he spied an opportunity. "I decided to buy the area development rights for Swensen's for Southern California," he said. "With my brother as a partner, we opened up about 20 ice-cream stores." The venture gave Champion a look, up close and personal, at the realities of running a retail business, he says. "At the time it felt like a tremendous challenge, but I learned a lot about retail and about real estate and development," he said. "We had to find sites and build out our stores, and I had my share of landlord disputes to work my way through as well." Champion eventually sold his Swensen's stores and went to work for La Mancha Development Co., a strip center de- veloper. Though he was only 24, Champion could talk to prospective tenants in their own language, thanks to his early experience in retail. "I was able to communicate to the tenants from the standpoint of the kind of volumes they could do at a particular location, and I could help them do their break- even analysis," he said. "I was definitely more equipped to be a good salesman. [Retail experience] also allowed me to assess potential tenants a lot better and reduce the number of ten- ants we did business with that would ultimately fail." Over a four-year period at La Mancha, Champion underwent a kind of crash course in the fundamentals of 50 S C T / O c t O b e r 2 0 1 4 P H O T O : G E O R G E J T O L A n D I I I / S I x T H R I B P H O T O G R A P H Y S a n d r a G . Y a v i t z , o w n e r o f Y a v i t z C o S . , S e a l B e a C h , C a l i f .