Today’s retail professionals enjoy tremendous access to rich data, but speakers during an ICSC LAS VEGAS session warned against putting too much stock in data-driven decisions regarding retail real estate. Avison Young director of retail market intelligence Meghann Martindale said during a Professional Development Workshop called Data-Driven Decisionmaking: From Customer Insights to Strategic Site Selection stated: “We’re drowning in data, but we’re sort of starved for that wisdom piece of: ‘How do you add that value? How [do you] make it meaningful to operate a property, to lease, to manage, to market, to sell, to acquire?’”

In a similar vein, Spatial.ai co-founder and CEO Lyden Foust said that despite the ready availability of mobile data and AI, technology can’t adequately replace in-person visits to retail sites. “All the data in the world doesn’t beat good old boots on the ground,” Foust declared. CBRE vice president of geographic information systems for location intelligence Marko Haarma said data can validate retail real estate decisions but cannot replace instincts and experience.

Expanding on Haarma’s point, Martindale emphasized the human element in arriving at conclusions about retail real estate. “You cannot lease, manage, sell, acquire retail real estate from a spreadsheet,” she said. “You have to go out and look at the site. You have to walk the site. You have to look at the audience and the sidewalks and the storefronts and all the minute details, and you also can’t do it from ChatGPT.”

Kimco and Nuveen Invest in Leasing Technology Start-Up

A partnership unveiled during ICSC LAS VEGAS holds the potential to shake up retail leasing. Bonside, a tech start-up that offers financial underwriting and funding to brick-and-mortar businesses, said retail REIT Kimco Realty and investment manager Nuveen Real Estate have invested an undisclosed amount in Bonside and will be among the first users of the start-up’s proprietary Bonside Scorecard underwriting tool. Bonside said the scorecard is “designed to help commercial landlords more efficiently assess the creditworthiness and risk of new and existing noncredit retail tenants.” Specifically, the scorecard enables landlords to evaluate tenant performance based on data pulled from accounting software. Bonside launched in 2023.

Bonside’s pitch to Kimco and Nuveen, Bonside founder and CEO Neha Govindraj said during an ICSC Professional Development Workshop titled Real Estate, Reinvented: How Proptech Is Driving the Transformation, was this: “Why don’t you come under the hood with us, see what we’re doing here, and why don’t we start to place this technology in the hands of property owners and landlords so that we can start to unlock a really powerful flywheel where you’re able to underwrite leases with speed? And then we can directly offer capital at that point, as well, so the operator can move at a faster pace.”

Aria Sees Its Tech as an “Air Traffic Controller” for Immersive Experience at Retail Properties

Corbin Ordel views his company’s technology as an “air traffic controller” for the customer experience at retail centers. Ordel is chief technology officer for The Aria Network, which supplies technology such as augmented reality and virtual reality to create immersive user experiences in retail environments.

For example, Aria’s technology could enable a shopper to scan a QR code and dive into an immersive experience about a movie being shown at a mall theater, he said during an ICSC LAS VEGAS Professional Development Workshop titled Building the Future: Developing Transformative Retail Environments. Ordel said of Aria’s immersive technology: “When you make something that’s really fantastic — maybe it’s really exciting, it is beautiful — people will come back.”

Aria is capitalizing on “all the best technology that we have at our disposal to make [the retail experience] really fun, really intuitive and really engaging,” Ordel said.

In a LinkedIn post after the session, Aria co-CEO Darren Mann said the company is rolling out its immersive technology nationally and is preparing for an international expansion. Aria is the exclusive AR/VR partner for Brookfield Properties, which operates more than 130 retail properties in the U.S.

On LinkedIn, Mann said his company “is actively transforming in-mall shopping behavior, replacing outdated search with a dynamic, AI-powered assistant that connects shoppers to real-time inventory, influencer-curated content and personalized offers from the moment they arrive. For brands, it means higher conversion and in-the-moment attribution. For landlords, it means turning foot traffic into rich first-party data and monetizable engagement.”