LAS VEGAS—In the first educational workshop at ICSC's RECon Convention, held here in Las Vegas, topics of overbuilding, recession, e-commerce, dependency on department stores, the experience economy, and the ever-changing consumer were at the forefront of the discussion. Presenter Yaromir Steiner, CEO of Steiner + Associates, said that all of those trends have come together to “demand change from shopping centers and malls.”

The workshop defined new approaches to create or bring existing retail real estate environments to their full potential and reviewed strategies that transcend traditional thinking to understand the key components of redevelopment plans that achieve triple bottom line success. The workshop also discussed challenges, opportunities, successes and failures to help the audience understand the path to value enhancement.

According to Steiner—whose experience comes from repositioning projects greater than 1 million square feet mainly in suburban locations—understanding the nature of the shopping trips and their impact on retail environments “will allow everyone to better understand how to best utilize a project.” When repositioning retail, he said, “it is essential to understand the classification of the shopping trips—need based services versus want base services.”