Mark Hunter inherited his love of retail from his dad, who spent much of his career as a Sears store manager. “I remember walking into the store with my dad, and him talking to the employees about how sales were the previous day,” he recalled. Thus, he credits his father for a roughly 30-year career spent strategizing retail development instead of working in it. “Retail is our lifeblood,” said Hunter, who started in January as managing director of retail assets services for CBRE.
As a mall manager, Hunter has overseen 135 large shopping centers, totaling some 100 million square feet. These include Del Amo Fashion Center, in Torrance, Calif.; King of Prussia (Pa.) Mall; and Water Tower Place, Chicago. He has headed up General Growth Properties’ third-party-management division and, more recently, was senior vice president of retail for Hudson Advisors, the asset-management arm of private-equity firm Lone Star Fund.
At CBRE he is charged with asset management, leasing, property management, accounting, marketing and development for large-scale retail properties. He also helps private and institutional owners and investors revive ‘B’ and even ‘C’-minus malls. “While a lot of people are running away from malls, we are running toward them,” he said.
CBRE brought Hunter in to strengthen its mall management portfolio and its reputation nationally. “We had a clear void [in that area],” said Todd Caruso, CBRE’s senior managing director of retail services. “We just saw the [mall] space as having so much more potential. We recognized Mark as a talent with big brand recognition in this arena.”
Hunter is CBRE’s soup-to-nuts expert, helping clients figure out what to do with the holes and vacancies in their shopping centers. He weighs whether to downsize the malls, add mixed-used components such as hotels, or team up with universities to provide space for satellite campuses, for instance. He then connects clients with other CBRE specialists in, say, the hotel and office divisions. “Generally, these locations are really sound locations,” he said. “The retailers that are there have proved that they can survive.” He is proud of CBRE’s diverse group of specialists. “Not too many real estate service providers can offer that extended menu of services,” he said.
A few years after graduating from Miami University in 1980, Hunter went to work for RREEF Funds, a San Francisco–based real estate investment manager that Deutsche Bank acquired in 2002. At RREEF he assisted with the management and leasing of nearly 30 shopping centers in the central U.S. He was general manager of Woodland Hills Mall, in Tulsa, Okla., in the late 1980s, when the Southern region underwent an oil bust. “The price of oil, literally overnight, went to $11 a barrel,” he said. “Our vacancies increased by 10 percent.”
To get through the recession, Hunter encouraged his team to be aggressive and creative about leasing. “We spent a lot of capital getting first-to-market retailers,” he said. Ten years after the recession, Woodland Hills was sold for a “very nice return,” Hunter said. Today it is considered one of the 50 best shopping centers in America. “My ideal was to have a Mark Hunter heading every one of my shopping centers,” said Lee Letchford, who was Hunter’s boss at RREEF and also at Urban Retail Properties. “He gets results.”
Hunter seems to have a gift for spotting trends. “He gets the connection between rents today and how they affect value and returns for the investor,” Caruso said. Hunter left RREEF in 2000 and went on to complete a two-year stint as an executive vice president at Urban Retail. After this, he joined The Mills Corp., being fascinated with the way that firm drew shoppers through its entertainment mixes. “They had a very novel and unique business model that was really ahead of its time,” he recalled. “Fifteen years ago they were adding movie theaters and NASCAR Speedparks to their centers.”
Hunter has since worked at General Growth Properties, as a senior vice president and also at JLL, where he was senior vice president of retail services. Three years into his time at JLL, Hunter had already helped double JLL’s regional profile in the Midwest. Through all this time, Caruso, who met Hunter when the latter was at General Growth, kept in touch. “I knew if we built this practice, he’d be the ideal person to lead it,” he said. “I think he’s going to put us on the map with the mall large-format practice.” SCT