CBRE Aims for 'Gold Standard' in Retail

LOS ANGELES-When CB Richard Ellis recruited top retail brokers in Southern California and Dallas recently, the new names were the latest in a long list that the Los Angeles-based company has added to its roster in the past year, as it has pursued a strategy designed to increase its dominance in the world of retail services and to refine the CBRE retail services model. CBRE has made this retail push without fanfare, but in the words of Anthony Buono, executive managing director of retail services for the Americas, the company’s goal is nothing less than “to be the gold standard for retail globally.”

CBRE is already the largest retail third-party provider in the country, but Buono tells GlobeSt.com that the company’s market share is still small because of the fractured nature of the retail services marketplace. Gradually, however, the retail services sector is consolidating in the same way that the office and industrial sectors did in an earlier era. CBRE’s strategy is designed both to take advantage of that consolidation and to help affect it.

As Buono explains to GlobeSt.com, CBRE’s strategy is focusing on three goals: becoming the gold standard for retail services by hiring the best talent, representing the best retail brands and creating a highly diversified platform. He says that the diversified platform is being designed so that the firm can do many things or one thing for a client, whether it is manage a property, lease a property, sell a property, represent tenants, build stores, develop real estate strategies, help a client recapitalize an asset or help a developer every step of the way from finding land for a project to developing a retail property and filling it with tenants.