The marketplaces industry is full of big personalities. The most successful players in this business are often those willing to take the biggest risks and make the biggest moves. They’re also visible leaders in their local communities, known for charitable works and cultural enrichment. They’re all about giving back, and they are determined to leave the marketplaces industry better than they found it.

To help ICSC celebrate 65 years, Commerce + Communities Today has assembled wisdom from some of the organization’s longtime members. Not all were born into the industry. Some started their careers as teachers, lawyers and accountants. They found their way to the business because of their love of dealmaking, community building and entrepreneurship. Not necessarily trained in real estate but possessing applicable skill sets, they learned the industry from the ground up and are sharing that body of knowledge so others might succeed as well.

Balancing Landlord and Tenant Needs

Norman Kranzdorf, one of the last living founding members of ICSC, has seen the organization grow and evolve through the marketplaces industry’s many cycles. When Kranzdorf joined ICSC in its first year, 1957, he never expected the group to achieve the magnitude and the reach it has. “It’s beyond anything we had in mind,” he said. “The trustees were so close; some of my happiest moments were during major trustee meetings. It was a get-together of friends enjoying themselves and also doing important business.”

A corporate lawyer by training, Kranzdorf started his career at Food Fair, developing shopping centers anchored by the supermarket’s stores. He went on to form what became Kranzco Realty Trust, and he retired from Urdang Capital Management in 2013. He also served as a director for NAI Global and for the American Bankruptcy Institute and sat on the board of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center.

Over the years, Kranzdorf helped shape ICSC through his work as a trustee, gaining as much as he gave along the way. Among his accomplishments was co-authoring ICSC’s first sample shopping center lease. He also pushed for more ICSC involvement in government affairs. He organized the group’s first public-private alliance meeting, and he pushed for an ICSC Political Action Committee and an office in Washington, D.C., from which to better influence legislation affecting the industry.

One of his proudest accomplishments was serving as chairman of the U.S. Bankruptcy Reform Task Force Committee, which helped pass a bankruptcy reform bill in January 2005. “Before the law, tenants could stay in a center indefinitely, for years and years, while it was going through bankruptcy,” he said. “That would hurt a center.” Kranzdorf also wrote a book about bankruptcy for shopping center landlords.

More than most ICSC members, Kranzdorf has experienced the cycles and learned how to work through them. “In good times and bad, you should also try to build a strong relationship with lenders, retailers and suppliers,” he said. “When times are tough, for instance, you don’t want to default on loans, if you can help it.”

Kranzdorf relied on the strength of his relationships, many forged through ICSC, to grow his business and profits. “Before I took my former company, Kranzco, public in 1992, I bought 16 centers out of bankruptcy court and got major lenders who were owed on the mortgages for those properties to call the judge to say that I would pay off the loans,” he recalled. “They were willing to vouch for me because I’ve worked hard to protect my reputation and treat people fairly.”

Kranzdorf ’s advice for those newer to the industry: “Making friends that you can rely on for information is key. I wish I would have known to meet more of my peers and become friendly with them.” To be a success, “you have to know everything about everything,” Kranzdorf advised. “The whole industry revolves around learning. Take educational classes. Mingle. Attend mixers so you know everybody should you need to call on someone for help. It’s a very collegial organization,” he said of ICSC.

Kranzdorf forecasts a bright future for the marketplaces industry. “Americans have been conditioned to be buyers. We are a consumption-oriented society,” he said. “Consumers will eventually come back to the stores. You will rent your stores.”

Kranzdorf ’s autobiography, A Man of Many Centers, is available on Amazon.

Crafting Regional Retail Destinations

Yaromir Steiner, founder and CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based Steiner + Associates, made a name for himself in the marketplaces industry with his development of Miami’s Cocowalk in 1993. The project was a model of new urbanism, with pedestrian-friendly leisure components, including restaurants, bars and a theater. Steiner followed that with the iconic Easton Town Center in Columbus, and he continues to build master-planned, mixed-use, new-urbanist developments around the country.

As an ICSC trustee, Steiner pushed for more focus on sustainability. He foresees a growing emphasis on green design in products, buildings and companies and a push toward more environmental responsibility in operations and in tenant mix. “When I was growing up in Istanbul, my father used to say, ‘We’re not rich enough to buy cheap things,’” Steiner said. “A Louis Vuitton bag was not necessarily a status symbol; it was a

product built to last. I think we are returning to an era where we’ll wear things until they wear off. This trend, which has given rise to resale concepts, will just grow stronger.”

Steiner also sees a future where regional retail destinations evolve into new concepts that are much different from the enclosed malls of yesteryear. This next generation of regional retail attractions will include multiple leisure tenants and outdoor components and must follow generally accepted urban design principles with plazas and streets. “They feel natural,” he described. “It’s not a mall where you just remove the roof; that doesn’t feel real.” The leasing team must balance tenant categories and tailor leasing packages and rent structures to each tenant so diff erent types can coexist successfully, he said. “Every time the environment is not coordinated, the high-rent payer chases away the low-rent payers. You cannot have a mall only made of jewelry stores who can pay maybe the highest rent.”

Keeping Centers Fresh with Small Businesses

Rebecca Maccardini believes the most successful marketplaces are those that keep customers excited enough to keep coming back. She learned the importance of marketing to drive foot traffic early in her career, helping develop retail properties in Michigan and elsewhere for The Forbes Co.

An educator by training, Maccardini has worked to advance the industry and ICSC for decades by teaching marketing and management skills in ICSC’s professional development programs. She became ICSC’s first female trustee in 1980 and held a variety of offices for the organization, including 1993-94 chair. She founded her own shopping center management consulting fi rm, RMResources, in 2000.

One of Maccardini’s top concerns: keeping her clients’ centers from looking too “vanilla.” She said: “My biggest concern for both the industry and the customer is the difficulty of incubating new concepts and small shop space.” Keeping the tenant mix fresh with innovative new concepts is crucial to success in the marketplaces industry, she said.

And when it comes to market data and consumer demographics, broad generalizations aren’t enough anymore. “Traditionally, people in our industry have believed what works in one place is bound to work in another,” Maccardini said. “In fact, we need individual market understanding.”

The Constant Evolution of Marketplaces

Valerie Richardson liked ICSC so much she took a job there. After a distinguished career working for retailers like Barnes & Noble, Ann Taylor and The Container Store, Richardson joined ICSC as COO in 2021.

In 2003, she led the opening of the first Container Store unit in New York City, a 40,000-square-foot space on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue. The transaction was a particularly complicated one, as it involved buying the previous tenant out of bankruptcy and taking a lease on the adjacent space, which meant dealing with two landlords, as well as completely renovating the historic building — all within six months.

Now at ICSC, Richardson, who launched her career in Dallas at Trammell Crow Co., is fulfilling a longtime goal of sharing the knowledge she has gained with the next generation of industry professionals.

“Retail is going through a tectonic plate shift,” she observed in 2017. “But this is an industry that’s been through a lot of disruption over the centuries. Marketplaces went from trading out of someone’s wagon to actually having shops to opening the first department store to opening the first mall. Someone was always running around thinking that the sky was falling. But it never did. Retailers respond. They evolve. Developers change to meet the needs of the customers. That’s what we do.”

Attracting Talent to the Industry

For Jimmy Maurin, attracting talent to the marketplaces industry remains a key concern. He has dedicated endless hours and funds to the ICSC Foundation to support scholarships, mentorships and other programs.

Active in the shopping center industry for more than 47 years, he’s the founder and former chair of development and management firm Stirling Properties. In addition to his own business, Maurin has served in a number of roles at ICSC, including state director of Louisiana and ICSC 2004-05 chair.

A certified public accountant by training, Maurin understands that real estate might not be the initial career of choice for many students. That’s why he’s worked with ICSC to ensure more students are aware of the multitude of career opportunities in the sector. “There were no real estate programs in colleges in the ’60s and ’70s, and they remained rare into the ’90s. But that’s changed now,” Maurin said.

Thanks in part to the efforts of ICSC and other professional associations, business majors are expressing interest in commercial real estate and the marketplaces industry, Maurin said. “If you looked at what fields MBA students wanted to enter 15 or 20 years ago, real estate would not be in top three or four. Today, if you look at MBA grads or undergrads, real estate is in the top three picks of 90% of them.”

Maurin, who has performed an executive residence teaching real estate at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, feels the marketplaces and real estate industries have an entrepreneurial spirit that is more attractive to many students than more institutional corporate careers like finance. “When you look at ICSC members, 90% are small companies with five to 10 people, and there are so many individual paths to take,” Maurin said. “You can go to work for Simon, you can go to work for Stirling or you can start your own shop. So real estate is very high on the list of top young students.”

The Marketplaces Industry’s Embrace of Mixed-Use

Gary Rappaport — CEO of Rappaport, the company he founded in 1984 — has been an ICSC member for 38 years. “Having the ability to network with industry leaders has contributed to my career success, and I would not be where I am today without the support and resources I received from ICSC,” Rappaport said.

His company provides leasing, tenant representation, management and development for 14.7 million square feet. As an active developer in the Mid-Atlantic, he long has been a proponent of mixing uses. The company’s portfolio includes more than 76 retail properties and ground-floor retail space in some 115 mixed-use properties, both residential and office.

Rappaport is committed to sharing his knowledge and experience as an entrepreneur. He has authored two editions of Investing in Retail Properties: A Guide to Structuring Partnerships for Sharing Capital Appreciation and Cash Flow.

He has made tremendous contributions to the marketplaces industry as former chair and trustee of ICSC and through his service on various high-level committees. And he continues to lobby at the state and federal government levels on many issues important to the shopping center industry. “The industry has come a long way since I first started,” Rappapport said. “The industry primarily revolved around open-air shopping centers and malls in its early stages. Membership was mainly shopping center developers with some members in the retail and financial side of the business.”

Today, the product type ICSC supports is broader, he said, as it recognizes the increasingly intertwined uses in urban development. “It includes urban street and mixed-use,” he said, citing residential, office, condos and hotels. “In addition, ICSC’s membership recognizes the vast diversity of today’s industry, which now offers academic memberships and memberships to those at any level of government.”

REITs

Milton Cooper set a trend in 1991 when he helped convert the development fi rm he co-founded in 1966 into equity REIT Kimco Realty. The successful initial public offering spurred other development firms to convert in order to tap public capital markets. Cooper, who retired as CEO of Kimco Realty in 2001 but still serves as executive chairman, said the move to equity REITs helped the industry become more sophisticated and bring in more investors. “It created a vibrant market and created liquid real estate, and that’s a major accomplishment,” he said. In 2011, he foresaw the REIT structure’s further expansion to more commercial real estate sectors. “It will grow,” he said. “You will see REITs in many other categories and industries that want to monetize their assets and grow dramatically.”

—Additional reporting by Joel Groover, Rebecca Meiser and Anna Robaton