It’s pretty safe to say that The Irvine Co. has the retail market cornered in its namesake Orange County city. The company owns 8.5 million square feet of retail, totaling 40 centers, in a master-planned community it built over decades referred to as the Irvine Ranch. Much of that retail is necessity-based, but the firm also operates a handful of high-profile centers, such as Irvine Spectrum. Fred Collings, senior vice president of leasing at Irvine Retail Properties, spoke to us about trends he sees in the markets and some projects the company current has in the works.

GlobeSt.com: How were you impacted by the store closings during the recession and how are retailer expansions impacting the firm?

Fred Collings: We fared pretty well during the recession because we are in this sweet little spot of heaven here in Orange County. Even though Orange County wasn’t immune to the recession, we did OK. We had some store closings but not a lot. Some of the closings were more about downsizing and lease expirations more than they were because of recession. We, like every other landlord in the country, embarked upon a program during the recession to retail our tenants and keep them open and operating, and we were successful at that. We’ve come out of the recession probably as strong as we have ever been. Our portfolio today is 96.8% leased. We went into the recession, if you look at June of 2008, when the recession started to kick into gear, we were at 95%. We weathered pretty well.