Shopping Centers Today

APR 2017

Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

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68 S C T / A P R I L 2 0 1 7 Washington Prime's Louis Conforti has worn a lot of hats, but real estate is his favorite By Rebecca Meiser Man of brick and mortar L ouis Conforti has always liked real estate. Real estate is solid, he says. It is tangible. This contrasts with much of the rest of his career, which has often dealt with the abstract: specifically, stocks and bonds. But now, since becoming CEO of Washington Prime Group in October, Conforti is dealing with the concrete: physical real estate. To be sure, Conforti can count beans. But he is a visionary too, and this is one of the reasons he was chosen to lead Washington Prime, a retail REIT spun off from Simon in 2014. Conforti is looking at Washington Prime real estate in ways it has not been looked at before, and people are happy about that. "I grew up modestly on the West Side of Chicago," Conforti said. "Something as amorphous as a stock or bond just didn't have the same appeal to me as a building. I liked that buildings were tangible, that you could kick and hug and reside in them." Perhaps there is some irony, therefore, in the fact that Conforti has spent so much time as a hedge fund manager. At Lake Forest College, Conforti majored in local and regional studies and played football. He was headed toward an academic career in sociology when he happened to connect with some University of Chicago alumni. One of them had been a fellow Lake Forest football player, and he convinced N E W S M A K E R S E X E C U T I V E M OV E R S A N D S H A K E R S P O R T R A I T : R O G E R M AST R O I A N N I

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