The 2026 ICSC Trustees’ Distinguished Service Award Honorees: Maranda Auzenne, Christine Firstenberg, Tom Onder and Ellen Sinreich

The ICSC Trustees’ Distinguished Service Awards symbolize lifetime achievement for ICSC volunteers devoted to the Marketplaces Industry through service on committees.

Read on or click below to jump to each honoree’s profile:

Maranda Auzenne Extends Her Impact From ICSC to Public Office
Christine Firstenberg Connects Commerce and Communities Across Northern California
Tom Onder Brings a Problem-Solver’s Mindset to Clients, Peers and ICSC
Ellen Sinreich’s Career Has Been Defined by the Lease — and by Giving Back

A career volunteer leader, Maranda Auzenne has elevated her giving game to a place few ICSC members dare venture: public office. In 2023, Auzenne was elected to the Cedar Hill, Texas, City Council, and she was re-elected this month.

She is only the fifth woman to hold a council post for the 175-year-old city, southwest of Dallas. “I ran because I love where I live and I care about the future of my city,” said Auzenne, who served as Planning and Zoning Commissioner from 2017 to 2023. “My heart is about serving, and my brain is about strategy.”

Auzenne, who has maintained a giving ethic through her 22-year commercial real estate career, is founder and president of consultancy Transitions Interim Property Management Solutions.

A Life Centered on Service

Auzenne also serves on the planning committee for the ICSC@RED RIVER event and previously served four years as the Red River Marketplace Council director. She sits on the boards of Star Transit, which connects the Dallas Area Rapid Transit light-rail system to Cedar Hill and other non-DART cities and the Cedar Hill Shares food pantry. Her volunteerism has become integral to her lifestyle. “I started this journey by asking what happens if I do get involved,” she said. “Now, the question for me is what happens if I don’t?” 

Calling her Trustees’ Distinguished Service Award a “profound career highlight” next only to her city council election, Auzenne is humbled, she said, “particularly because I know how many people work hard behind the scenes to make ICSC’s initiatives so successful.”

Championing Inclusion and Opportunity

Auzenne has been a career-long advocate for women and diversity in the industry. Noting a shortage of women as she attended her first John T. Riordan School for Retail Real Estate Professionals session in 2009, Auzenne pushed for more ICSC panels featuring women. “Today, women aren’t just participating in the industry,” she said. “We’re shaping it, leading deals, influencing market trends, driving innovation and building companies.”

Auzenne also has helped recruit countless prospective ICSC volunteers. “I tell them their perspective matters and their talents are needed in the ICSC community,” she said.

A Strategic Bet on Herself

Auzenne’s two-year-old consultancy helps commercial real estate companies align their operations with strategic vision, helping them navigate transitional challenges like budget development, staff optimization and integration of new properties into existing portfolios. She never envisioned life as a business owner, much less a consultant, as she felt “comfortable and fulfilled” in the corporate digs of her previous employer, Trademark. But she saw a niche need for guidance in the interim property management field. “Rather than seeing consulting as a leap into the unknown, I started reframing it as a bet on my years of experience and the value that I could bring,” she said.

After an exhaustive stretch of doing most of the heavy lifting at the upstart firm, Auzenne had an epiphany: “My job wasn’t to do all the work; it was to train, mentor and inspire others to do it and to eliminate barriers for them, which allows me to meet my clients where they were and better create pathways for their problem-solving.” On her social media profiles, Auzenne now lists her role as “chief obstacle remover.”

Building a Foundation in Real Estate Operations

Auzenne began her commercial real estate career with financial firm Ryan, ultimately overseeing 28 offices and 500,000 square feet in the U.S. and Canada, responsible for site/facility selection, design and construction.

After three years, in 2007, she noticed that the mixed-use, open-air lifestyle center being developed three miles from her home — Uptown Village at Cedar Hill, now Hillside Village — was looking for an operations manager. It was appealing, considering gas prices were soaring. Though she’d headed only office before, Auzenne landed an offer from developer Buddy Herring, a former ICSC chair. “Buddy ended negotiations with HR by yelling into the interview room: ‘I like her. Give her what she’s asking,’” she recalled.

For MGHerring Group, Auzenne managed the 77-acre Hillside property, overseeing its redevelopment, instituting creative security protocols and forging economic partnerships with city and county officials. When the property sold and Trademark became its third-party manager, she joined Trademark and remained with the property. She recalled an in-depth talk with Steve Sumell, now retired but then an executive vice president at Trademark, about carrying her volunteerism ethic into ICSC. He suggested she join the Red River planning committee, and thus her volunteerism with ICSC began.

Mentors Who Shaped Her Path  

Difference-makers in Auzenne’s career include Hillside manager Norine Bowman, “a mentor and advocate for me in every sense of the word,” Auzenne said; Susan Miller and Jessica Miller Essl, co-presidents of M2G Ventures, the first large client for Transitions Interim Property Management Solutions; Ryan CEO Brint Ryan; Trademark founder and CEO Terry Montesi; and Weitzman executive managing director Bob Young, who advised Auzenne to “get to know as many people as possible with the intention of making a real connection,” she recalled. “That was the best piece of commercial real estate career guidance I ever received.”

—Steve McLinden

Christine Firstenberg Connects Commerce and Communities Across Northern California

This past March at ICSC@MONTEREY, ICSC Northern California Marketplace Government Relations chair Christine Firstenberg warned an audience about a new batch of bills that could create headaches for shoppers and the Marketplaces Industry in California. Stepping onstage and into that government relations role felt like coming full circle for the veteran broker and dedicated ICSC volunteer. “I’ve been involved with ICSC since the time I started out in the brokerage business,” she told the attendees. “Thirty years ago, I stood here in the very beginning of my career to give the GR update. Here I am doing it again.”

The Metrovation Retail Resources president has been a tireless advocate for ICSC and a “general go-getter for anything public-sector related,” said ICSC vice president of volunteer engagement Michael Cowden. “Christine is very focused on including cities and economic development arms within our events because she sees how valuable it is for the industry. I firmly believe it’s also because she understands that communities thrive more when they’re at the table talking about retail development.”

Decades of Service and Volunteer Leadership

Firstenberg joined ICSC upon taking her first real estate job in the early 1990s. Her initial mentor in retail leasing was ICSC volunteer Doug Wiele, who went on to help start Whitney Development Co. and Foothills Partners. “I was in my mid-20s and Doug said to me: ‘You’ve got to be a member of ICSC, and ... you’ve got to be involved,’” Firstenberg recalled. “He encouraged me to become the Northern California government affairs person, and that’s what I did. Every year for my entire career, I have held some kind of leadership position at ICSC.” Last year, Firstenberg reprised that first government relations role by signing on as Government Relations chair for the Northern California Marketplace Council. For ICSC, she also has:

• served on the Northern California Marketplace Council program planning committee from 1994 to the present.

• chaired the first Northern California Alliance program in 2004 and 2005.

• co-chaired the Monterey event’s program planning committee from 2005 to 2007.

• co-chaired the Northern California P3 retail private sector committee from 2007 to 2014.

• chaired the Western Division P3 retail private sector committee from 2016 to 2017 and 2018 to 2021.

• sat on the Community Advancement Advisory Committee from 2023 to 2025.

• co-facilitated ICSC webinars in partnership with the California chapter of the American Planning Association in 2024.

• championed the 2025 launch of the ICSC Excellence in Community Advancement Awards.

• mentored Community Advancement chairs of multiple ICSC Marketplace Councils.

• moderated and spoken on panels at countless ICSC events, including ICSC@MONTEREY, ICSC Cornerstone-Berkeley and ICSC@Western States.

She continues to serve on the Northern California Marketplace Council.

At the Center of NorCal’s Retail Evolution

Firstenberg co-founded Metrovation Brokerage in 2002 with the late Merritt Sher and his partner Mark Seiler. She previously had worked with Sher — a community revitalization-focused retail developer who earned the moniker “the philosopher of place” — for nine years at another firm he founded, Terranomics. Metrovation Retail, now owned by Firstenberg, is an offshoot of the former Metrovation Brokerage.

Representing both tenants and landlords, Firstenberg has played part in roughly 500 transactions totaling more than 3.5 million square feet. She has exclusively represented retailers like Walmart, Target, Andronico’s Community Markets, Safeway, Stein Mart, Office Depot, Century Theatres and AMC Theatres. Her landlord clients have included Crow Holdings, Pacific Development Group, Catellus, Starwood Retail Partners, The Sobrato Organization and Regency Centers.

Firstenberg recalled how she persuaded Jim McMasters to hire her for her first real estate job, at brokerage firm McMasters and Westland. “I just kept pushing and pushing,” she said. “Finally, I just showed up to his office and said: ‘Hey, I want to work here. I earned my real estate license. Do you have a desk for me?’ I just wore him down.”

She was in her third year there when a landlord who happened to be a family friend asked for help with a vacancy. “I cold-called Walmart, reached the real estate manager and presented the site to him,” Firstenberg recounted. Though he was interested, that deal ultimately fell through. Still, Walmart’s real estate team saw something in Firstenberg and gave her an exclusive territory. “Normally at that time, they gave territories only to developers, not brokers,” she explained. For one tour, she rented a 12-person van to take the Walmart team and Rob Walton — board chair from 1992 to 2015 and the son of Walmart founder Sam Walton — to sites around Northern California. The younger Walton drove. “We ended up doing a Walmart deal,” Firstenberg said. “So here I was having cold-called Walmart and not only gotten a territory but a Walmart deal, too. That was quite a good start to my fourth year.”

Firstenberg represented chains like Costco and Kohl’s in similar Northern California expansions. “You meet at 7:30 in the morning and drop the clients off at 7 at night,” she said. “They’re so tired they don’t even want to get dinner. They know you’ll be picking them back up at 7:30 in the morning.”

From City Hall to Commercial Real Estate

When Firstenberg became a retail broker, she immediately knew she had found her calling. Growing up in Concord, a city northeast of San Francisco, she had been intrigued by the political, economic and development issues that were emerging in the fast-growing region. “I had a political advocacy background before I got into commercial real estate,” she explained. “My dad was a businessperson in Concord and had also gone into politics when I was in the fourth grade. I had kind of grown up in City Hall.”

As a result, the young broker knew how local governments worked and understood public officials’ “city speak” lingo. It set her apart from other brokers, she said. “Many of them avoided city involvement. For me, it was smooth sailing.”

Firstenberg was working on a development in 2004 when she encountered pushback from city officials. Knowing that ICSC had started a public-private partnership arm then called the Alliance program, she tried to find a contact for her region. She recalled: “The person in charge said: ‘Christine, there isn’t one. Why don’t you do it?’ So I started ICSC’s Alliance focus for Northern California.”

Thanks in part to years of bridge-building by ICSC volunteers since, local officials now have a better understanding of what it takes for retailers to do business in their cities, Firstenberg said. “In the Bay Area, most of the cities know about ICSC, and in many cases the economic development people are now members.”

Shaping Policy With an Industry Lens

On the policy front, meanwhile, her new role as government relations chair for the Northern California Marketplace Council is impactful, Cowden said. “California is often ahead of other states in terms of developing new policy proposals that eventually spread to other states and jurisdictions,” he noted. “A lot of these ideas, if adopted, would have a major impact on the industry. Legislators are nearly always well-intentioned, but part of our job is to ensure they understand the potentially unintended consequences of their actions.”

In her ICSC@MONTEREY government relations update this spring, Firstenberg noted that one of her priorities this year is raising awareness about preserving adequate retail square footage. California’s housing push is in danger of going too far, she said, leading to places where people have nowhere to buy groceries or other basic needs. “My job now going forward with government relations is taking what I learned in community advancement and applying it at the state level so that we can have more balanced laws,” Firstenberg said. “I feel excited about it. It’s still the same concept of helping communities grow in a positive way.”

—Joel Groover

Tom Onder Brings a Problem-Solver’s Mindset to Clients, Peers and ICSC

When Tom Onder joined ICSC in 2008 upon the advice of a shopping center REIT client, it didn’t take the young Stark & Stark attorney long to recognize the organization’s value. He immersed himself in Philadelphia regional activities at the height of the financial crisis, which led him to discover both that he enjoyed networking and that he was good at it.

The chaos of the financial crisis also provided occasion for him to use his passion for problem solving. “I’m a big crossword puzzle guy,” said Onder, who chairs Stark & Stark’s shopping center and retail development group in Princeton, New Jersey. Also, “Batman is my favorite superhero because at the end of the day, he’s a detective who solves problems. That is a lot of what I do. I try to get into the issues my clients are running into in real estate and figure out how to get them out of that problem or solve that problem.”

A Deep Commitment to ICSC

Onder took to heart the vital role ICSC volunteers play in the education, training, guidance and other activities that build marketplaces that serve and enhance communities. Numerous posts he’s held over the past 18 years testify to his selfless dedication to the organization, according to ICSC vice president of volunteer engagement Michael Cowden. Onder’s ICSC service ranges from the Next Generation Committee for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware region to work with the ICSC Foundation’s mentorship program for the past four years. He is a member of ICSC’s Economic Policy Committee and Legal Advisory Council, and in 2025, he led the PA/NJ/DE Marketplace Council’s Community Advancement initiative during a leadership void. Onder was honored to be asked to help the Community Advancement program, which brings the private and public sectors together to facilitate development. “The substantive value of ICSC is that you’re going to learn something at a networking event or one of its programs,” added Onder. “It gives you the pulse of the industry and issues that developers, owners and tenants are thinking about and dealing with.”

A Reputation for Collaboration and Energy

Retail Sites vice president of development Morgan Hill Konstantinidis first worked with Onder around 2014, when they co-chaired the PA/NJ/DE Next Generation committee. She watched Onder expand his ICSC service to chair the dealmaking show for the Philadelphia region, where he increased fundraising and attendance while spearheading more ICSC members to participate in planning events. She also noted his willingness to “dive in headfirst” as a friend and colleague to support the Marketplaces Industry and its local professionals.

“Tom is one of the first people I think of for any ICSC event given the energy, support and thought leadership he has brought throughout the organization’s many levels,” said Konstantinidis. “It seems that he’s always raising his hand to collaborate with ICSC members and share his knowledge.”

Solving Complex Real Estate Challenges

Onder, who joined Stark & Stark in 2004, protects landlords nationally when retailers file for bankruptcy. He also helps owners of shopping centers, warehouses, apartments and other properties work out development, lease enforcement and other snags, primarily in New York and New Jersey. While owner representation accounts for the lion’s share of his business, he said, tenant representation makes up about 20%. Additionally, he is a member of Stark & Stark’s litigation group and bankruptcy and creditors’ rights group. He frequently summons his litigating experience to convince clients not to go to trial, though just like his favorite problem-solving superhero Batman, he’s always prepared for a fight, if necessary. “There are ways to solve problems where the client can control the outcome as opposed to going before a judge and waiting as long as three years to get an answer,” he said. “I have the ability to tell my clients in a practical manner how things could go in court, either for good or for ill.”

From Public Relations to Real Estate Law

Onder took a public relations job to pay for his education at Cleveland State University, and he remained in that industry after graduating and moving to New York City. But an attorney he had worked with along the way stayed on his mind. “I was always fascinated when the guy spoke,” Onder recalled, “and I thought: ‘That’s something that I would like to do one day.’” So he decided to get his law degree.

—Joe Gose

Ellen Sinreich’s Career Has Been Defined by the Lease — and by Giving Back

Many in the industry view a lease simply as a basic necessity, the final step to get a deal across the finish line. Ellen Sinreich isn’t most people. She has a passion for leases that comes through loud and clear. “Every deal has a life of its own,” said Sinreich. “Every lease has a life of its own. In fact, I should be wearing a T-shirt right now that says ‘I love the lease’ because I really do.”

A graduate of Columbia Law School, Sinreich is the founder and principal of The Sinreich Group, a law firm specializing in commercial leasing work. She is known for her meticulous eye for detail, a strategic approach to managing the legal leasing process to eliminate conflict and delay and her ability to get “bulletproof” leases across the finish line.

A Commitment to ICSC and the Industry

Sinreich has contributed her time, energy and expertise to various ICSC volunteer and leadership positions for decades. She also is an avid speaker, webinar host and author of various white papers, e-books and blog posts on real estate, leasing, sustainability and legal issues.

She is respected by her peers and embodies the values of ICSC. “Throughout her involvement with ICSC, Ellen has consistently gone above and beyond in her leadership roles,” said Simon executive vice president of administration and legal services Michele Walton. “Whether serving on committees or supporting key initiatives, she is always prepared, engaged and focused on delivering value not just for ICSC but for the industry as a whole.”

Sharing Expertise Through Education and Leadership

Sinreich is a firm believer that the lease is the single most important document when it comes to income-producing property, and that passion comes through when she talks about the nuances of lease documents. Every lease contains certain standard provisions. However, every one of those needs to be reviewed to see how it relates to a particular situation, explained Sinreich.

With a client list that includes both landlords and tenants, she is an advocate for leases that are short, even-handed and not punitive. “I am constantly imploring my clients to get rid of what I would call their ‘dinosaur’ form leases that address every landlord-tenant issue since the beginning of time — and ultimately lengthen every lease negotiation,” Sinreich said.

Her passion prompted Sinreich to spearhead a Virtual Series of webinars called ICSC Legal Forum from 2020 to 2024. “That was an amazing opportunity for me and hopefully for my audiences to really explore the issues of the day with the top thought leaders in our industry,” she said.

Leading Through Connection and Community

Sinreich credits her focus on commercial lease law to an advanced real estate course she took during law school. The professor conveyed the dynamic and creative aspects of real estate in a way that sparked her interest. She also had a natural inclination toward retail, as her father worked as a clothing manufacturer and wholesaler. “When I first was introduced to retail and the whole community of ICSC, I just felt like I was home, having grown up with that being such a focus of my father’s professional life,” she said.

When still a young lawyer at a large corporate firm, Sinreich received a big piece of advice: Elevate your networking by joining professional associations. She took that advice to heart. She joined ICSC in 1989 and since has taken on numerous volunteer and leadership roles on a variety of committees and events. She currently chairs the ICSC Legal Advisory Council and is a long-standing member of the ICSC Environmental and Land Use Policy Committee.

Sinreich also has played a key part in building and strengthening community among women in retail real estate beyond ICSC, currently serving as the New York regional leader of The Pipeline, a networking group for women in real estate. “What stands out is how intentional she is,” said MCB Real Estate vice president of retail leasing Julie Fox, who also is co-founder of The Pipeline. “She doesn’t just host events; she ensures they are meaningful and impactful for those who attend. Her ability to bring people together and foster genuine relationships is a direct reflection of her commitment to the industry.”

Curiosity as a Career Constant

Sinreich’s advice for new ICSC members, similar to the advice she received early in her career, is to raise your hand and volunteer. “You’ll meet people you would not have had the opportunity to meet, and it is an incredible learning experience,” she said.

Sinreich values lifelong learning and enrichment in both her professional and personal lives. On the personal side, that includes a newly discovered passion for acting and off-Broadway theater. “It’s been a thrilling journey,” she said. “Where else can you go and leave yourself behind and just inhabit another character? It’s a fascinating thing to do.”

—Beth Mattson-Teig