NEW YORK CITY—Retail rents are soaring, the holiday season is growing longer each year and online shopping has hit record levels. What are companies in the space doing to leverage these trends?

GlobeSt.com sat down with Cushman & Wakefield's head of retail real estate Gene Spiegelman to find out in this EXCLUSIVE story.

GlobeSt.com: What's the climate in the retail sector going into ICSC's National Deal Making show today?

Spiegelman: There's a healthy deal pipeline going into 2016; everyone's going in with a full dance card. There are more meetings that could be taken than you can schedule.

And there's a high percentage of the business that will take place that won't relate to the New York City region, the deals are all over the place; it's a wide geography.

GlobeSt.com: How are retailers managing the holiday season?

Spiegelman: We've seen a significant increase in online sales. There's a stretched out holiday season; Black Friday important as a ceremonial date, but many people haven't even started their holiday shopping. For retailers, there's an ongoing rebalancing of sales channels, because there's pure brick-and-mortar retail, online shopping or a blended fashion where consumers are doing research beforehand or during their purchasing process.

Companies can manage this by space optimization, constant rejiggering where they place your stores, reconsidering their logistics facility, etc. It's a very fluid process?

GlobeSt.com: Are you seeing any particular companies do this in an innovative way?

Spiegelman: At the Best Buy here on 6th Avenue and 23rd Street, the whole front of the store now is taken up with what's actually a shelving and picking system. But it looks like a very large vending machine with an automated arm. Called Chloe, it's stacked with DVDs so instead of displaying the merchandise in large areas of the store—which requires a building out of the space—this machine allows for denser inventory and it's very vertical so it's cheaper and allowing customer to get merchandise on demand and there are no shipping costs. There are benefits to densification and having systems in a store—which have been scaled—that usually would be in the warehouse.

Also, Banana Republic was using a marketing strategy this year for mobile phones where you find an item online, select it and it's waiting for you in the store.

GlobeSt.com: What's the takeaway message from such efforts?

Spiegelman: Retailers need to keep up with changing consumer demand.