Retail Tech Driving 'Huge National Footprint' of Buyers That Still Require Human Touch

Retail tech has made more data than ever before available to retailers, landlords, and investors – but sifting through and harnessing data and the platforms that provide them still requires a human element.

Panelists from retail tech companies, data platforms and brokerage alike at ICSC Western States this week agreed that “there’s always going to be an element of intuition required,” as Chris Lee from Placer.ai noted in the discussion.

“At Placer, we’re aggregating data,” Lee said. “If you can use data to understand patterns of people moving around, to understand how far they’re commuting and things like that, you don’t have to drive and see properties in 50 different markets.  You can pull that down to what’s going to be a higher likelihood of success and focus on those options, because you have all this data at your fingertips.”

Brandon Isner, Americas head of retail research at CBRE, said brokers then make that data tangible for clients.

“A lot of people will concentrate on what the new tech is, but the question then becomes, how do you assimilate that,” he said. “The human element really comes into place because if we have someone looking at a site, Placer is the best data out there for mobile data. We’ll also want to get what the comps are and look into what are construction costs, so we go to another platform for that. We’re looking at what’s the  educational component so we’ll look at Census data. And then we compile all that into finding the best possible markets for our clients.

“Back in the day you’d throw 50 stores in a market and figure out which works,” he said. “Now you can pinpoint the exact traffic that you want and success is much more expected than before.”

Courtney Ettus, chief marketing officer at Crexi, said physical and geographic proximity to an asset is no longer a limit for buyers, who now have an extraordinary amount of meaningful information at their disposal.

“Years ago, there was the old adage that you could stand on top of a building and shout and the buyer would actually hear you,” she said. “Now what we’re finding is people have so much more data to understand what’s happening, so there is a huge national footprint of buyers coming from different markets. If you bought an asset in Minneapolis and you see a similar one in Phoenix, you might buy it sight unseen – which was absolutely unheard of fifty years ago. But now buyers can access that meaningful information to inform their decision-making.”

Ultimately, Ettus says, utilizing CRE technology is a “matter of making sure it’s the right and best deal and that information and data is there and aggregated in a way that allows you to sort through and make a great decision.”