This Is What 80 Years in Real Estate Teaches You

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is SGBB27. SGBB27, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week. This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Mr. Jeff Rosenberg. Jeff is the president and CEO of big V property group. Jeff, thank you for being on the show today.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (00:33)
Happy to be here.

Aviva (00:35)
Jeff, for all the listeners, will you tell us who you are, what you do, and how we came to be here today on Commercial Real Estate Secrets?

Jeffrey Rosenberg (00:44)
Sure. So happy to share. I'm going to give you my elevator speech. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to interrupt me. So we started way back in 1942. My grandfather opened up a corner grocery store in the 50s. He actually was one of the first people to use crowdsource funding because he sold

$100 savings bonds to all of his customers who walked through the door to be able to build a much bigger supermarket. And that's how he financed it. So before Crowdsource or CrowdStreet or anything, he was on the corner selling $100 savings bonds to all of his customers to finance a store, which is kind of fun, right? So opened up the store, that chain grew.

At the time we sold the company, had about 34 supermarkets, about 4,000 employees and did a fair amount of business. We sold the supermarket company but kept the retail. So at the time, my grandfather actually used to drive around with my grandmother, look at locations, look at all the areas around and look the houses and say, okay, we're gonna build a supermarket here. He will build the supermarket and a shopping center, which we would own.

And then he would also buy all the land around the supermarket and the shopping center. He'd sell all the land around and then use that capital to build the next store. And that's how he financed his growth over a period of 20 or 30 years. And so it was pretty interesting story. But he was really the real estate king at the time because he and my grandmother would just drive around.

looking for locations, no demographics, no study, no really anything except, ah, this looks like a good place to put a supermarket. So fun story. So we sold the company back in the 80s, but kept the real estate and then transitioned the real estate to around the country. So I joined back in 1995 and decided that we needed to be countrywide to mitigate our family risk.

Aviva (02:31)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (02:55)
And so we started to expand our footprint and now we're in, I wanna say 14 states around the country with 54 shopping centers plus a host of other types of real estate.

Aviva (03:08)
Fascinating. I can relate. My real estate story started with my grandfather and grandmother, and who just shaped our futures today. And I think about them literally every single day when I get to lease and manage the properties that they bought in the 60s and the 70s and 80s. And what a legacy and a pleasure. But I don't have to tell you about that.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (03:32)
It is, and you know, I still own the office building that my grandfather built for the supermarkets back in the 70s. I still own the original location where the store was. We still own a bunch of that legacy real estate, which is really kind of fun. But today, you know, we're really focused, stolen retail, but in a different segment of the retail market. So at that time, we were focused on supermarket anchored centers, right? Because we own the supermarkets.

Aviva (03:59)
Sure.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (03:59)
in the

shopping centers and we transitioned to a different segment of the retail real estate, which is open air, big box centers. And so our centers today are basically the dominant centers in the market and big box, meaning they've got say a target and then they've got Best Buy, Ross Stores TJ Maxx, you know, those types of tenants. And those are the

tenants that populate most of our shopping centers.

Aviva (04:27)
So, you know, I opened my phone up this morning and I read an article that said seven Walgreens are closing in the Denver metro area, newly. You know, I'm not here to knock retail or big box retail, but it's certainly, pre-COVID, everybody was saying retail is dead, you know, and then they got into COVID and they got into the office's dead kick and now retail's reviving, but.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (04:31)
Yes.

Aviva (04:52)
I know big box retail has struggled, which does not necessarily, I always say, you know, don't pull out your tissues for your local landlord. They're probably, you know, unless they're levered out of their ears, okay. Big box retail has been a, it has been impacted by e-commerce, correct me if I'm wrong. Tell me about the changes you've seen in big box retail since you started in the 90s.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (05:13)
Mm-hmm.

So big box retail has really figured out the whole internet component because we call our big box retailers today omnichannel retailers because what they've done is they've used their retail stores as distribution hubs. So if you think about when you go to a larger national chain that's a retailer or a big box retailer, you can

acquire the products that you're looking to buy in various different ways. You can order on the web and pick it up in the store. You can go into the store and have it shipped to your house. You can pull up in front in a designated space and have them deliver it to you within three minutes. can check their inventory. You can have it delivered in one day from that store.

And so there are various ways that the retailer today has successfully navigated the challenges that Amazon and COVID and other market conditions have provided and are very successful. Now, you hear in the news all sorts of closings, right? So what did we hear the other day? think what's closing now, Party City, right? And I'm sure you have...

Aviva (06:36)
Party's

over. All the puns.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (06:37)
Okay,

that's good parties over for party sir, which is true But you know party city occupies space, which is very desirable our business has record high occupancy levels think our Portfolio think is that a 97 % occupancy rate? Okay, so There is very little opportunity for us to actually fill our spaces

unless somebody goes out of business. So, you know, when Bed Bath & Beyond went out, we were pretty happy because they had long-term leases at really low rents, and we were able to replace those tenants with much higher paying rent tenants. Now that Party City is going out of business, we have, maybe five or six in our portfolio. It's an opportunity for us to replace them with better quality, higher grade,

Aviva (07:25)
Wow.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (07:32)
credit tenants paying more rent. And so the other question everybody asks me is, well, you know, why not supermarket anchored? Because, you know, supermarket anchored is the best of the retail, the safest, the most secure. And some of that is true. Right. But if you think about it, we were in the supermarket business and when we signed a supermarket lease as supermarket operators, you know, we signed a 50 year lease with almost no increases in rent.

Aviva (07:58)
you

Jeffrey Rosenberg (08:02)
Right? So many of the supermarkets today have very long-term leases with very low rental increases. And so most of your rental increases that you're getting when you own a supermarket anchor center from your, you know, mom and pop, what, pizzeria or the dry cleaner or the nail salon, right? The local guys that are next to the supermarket.

Aviva (08:21)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (08:28)
And that's where some of your increases are coming from. But we like Big Box. And also, you have to remember in the Big Box world, a lot of these centers were built in the aughts in the late 90s and mid 90s. And those leases are coming up to the end of term. And so we've got in the mid 25s to 30s, we've got a whole bunch of opportunity because these leases are now coming to term.

Aviva (08:45)
Wow.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (08:55)
And we have negotiating power today because of the lack of vacancy in the marketplace. And so a big box retailer is going to have a harder time today moving their store down the road than they would have five or 10 years ago.

Aviva (09:12)
Wow.

You may be comfortable with this, you may not be comfortable with this. You know, I've heard from friends who are landlords like Starbucks is the pain to deal with, or like Burlington has cult followings and they do long-term lease. Do you have any funny stories of well-known tenants?

Jeffrey Rosenberg (09:16)
Okay.

So I have a couple of, yes, I do. So it's well known in the industry that raw stores is difficult to deal with. So I don't know if you've ever been to a raw store, right? It's a treasure hunt product, right? So they don't have the same thing all the time and you have to be lucky to go in there and see what they have. I don't think they sell anything on the web because everything that they sell is through their stores.

Aviva (09:44)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (09:56)
but they use that to their advantage, their power, because they're a very strong, high credit tenant. And so they use that as an opportunity. But the best story I like to tell is the story during COVID from McDonald's. you know, during COVID, you really understood what a tenant value system was, right? And who...

you were as an operator and who the tenants were as operators. And the story I tell is, let's take Starbucks you mentioned and McDonald's, two different worlds. Starbucks, which we have, several Starbucks in our portfolio, proceeded to pay no rent and negotiate hard for rent reductions, deferments, concessions during COVID period, right?

McDonald's sent a letter from the, I think it was the head of US, and basically said that we have been your partner for 40 years. We value that partnership and we will continue to pay rent during this period of time because we understand the stresses that you're going through and you are a valued partner of ours and we will support you like you have supported us.

And I have a copy of that letter and I always think about that because you've got two value systems, right, from two tenants that did fairly well during the COVID period, right?

Aviva (11:27)
Did the McDonald's letter say PS? Let us know when you want to sell.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (11:31)
No, but, but, you know, McDonald's, that to me, that's a corporate culture. That's a view of partnership in the world. And that really shows what type of organization you are. And, you know, Starbucks, they, protected their assets. They negotiated hard for, for concessions and benefits and deferments, similar to many other tenants that we had.

did that. But I always go back to that letter from from from McDonald's because to me that was just a key difference between corporate cultures.

Aviva (12:07)
So interesting. We have 110 tenants. We did in March of 2020. And I know exactly what you're talking about. That April 1st, 2020 was an interesting day. You know, we have a lot of mom and pops, and we really found the mom and pops just showed up and paid their rent. And that was just a nod to, I don't know, you know, a nod to small business.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (12:24)
Mm-hmm.

Aviva (12:37)
And, it's like you said, it's very interesting to see the different values of different companies.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (12:40)
It is.

It is, you know, during COVID, again, for us, you know, we have, if you look on our website, we've got our core values and we really take those core values seriously. And so during COVID, we basically told all of our vendors that we will pay you in full, regardless of whether you're coming to our centers or not. We expect you to pay your employees in full. We paid all of our, we paid everybody in full.

all of our lenders, we didn't ask for any forbearance stocks, no deferments on loans. We just continued as business as usual, supporting those people who support us over the years. And so that's just who we are. And it's nice to see that that's actually out there in other firms, as I shared as an example.

You know, we did something called Big V Cares where we supported all of our restaurant tenants. put up signs, we did advertising for them. We bought in various centers from our restaurant tenants. We bought lunches for first responders. We did a whole host of initiatives to support our tenants. So fun, but you know, that's who we are.

That comes from being in business 80 years and being through many cycles and surviving many, many business cycles, you know, through the 80 years that we've been around.

Aviva (14:05)
Yeah. So, you know, I've seen a trend recently. These pickleball concepts are going into Bed Bath and Beyonds. It's this thing we're seeing. Are there any of these new emerging uses that like pickleball where you're seeing LOIs for your centers and going, wow, I never would have thought in a million years this would be on my desk.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (14:27)
Some of them are like that. It's kind of interesting because it provides us with the opportunity to make choices for what kind of services we're providing for our tenants. And so we don't have any pickleball courts. I think we have an offer for one vacancy from a pickleball user. I've been to Texas where they built like 80 court facilities that are just phenomenal with indoor play areas and

Aviva (14:51)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (14:55)
really an interesting concept. And so I don't have today any of those types of products in our, in our centers. There are interesting concepts coming out. What's what I find fascinating too is the number of internet only companies that are opening up retail storefronts. You know, you have to remember. So, so studies say that if you're a internet only company and you open a retail storefront,

you will increase your sales from that area by over 30%. If you close the store, you have a similar degeneration in your website traffic. And we're talking about website traffic. So the sales to your website will go up within an area if you open a retail store. And so what happens is you're no longer evaluating the success of a retail store by the sales that it generates in the store, right? You're evaluating the

success of the retail store by the number of purchases that are generated through the web picked up in the store, through the web shipped to that area, you know, and there are other metrics that are currently being used to really show and demonstrate success for a store.

Aviva (16:10)
Sure. It's like I said, people see the media and they just want to tell you everything that's wrong with commercial real estate. And no, I think retail is, I mean, I just think as a culture, we can't ever go without retail. Ever. know, gyms.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (16:25)
You can't.

Aviva (16:28)
restaurants, salons, hairdryers, hairdryers, dry cleaners, hairdryers too. no, like culturally retail is essential and...

Jeffrey Rosenberg (16:35)
Right.

It's a social event, right? When you're out, you go out. mean, my kids buy some stuff online, but they actually like to go look at the stuff they're looking to buy, whether it's clothing or other things. They actually like to look at it. So they'll drive to look at a product that they're interested in purchasing.

And we see that all over the place and our traffic is up. So we use a fascinating product. And I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but it's called Placer AI. And this is not a plug at any way means for this product, but it allows us to track the traffic of the individual shopper and where they go on a minute by minute basis. we track through all of our shopping centers where the customer goes.

when they go, where they go after they go to a store, and then what is the shopping pattern of that customer within the shopping center. And then we look at modifying our signage and the way we deal with customer traffic based upon what we see in these patterns. And so it's pretty interesting today in the technology that's available to

Aviva (17:53)
crazy.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (17:55)
help us service the customers that we have.

Aviva (17:59)
Fascinating. You know, we do warehousing and we always say that there's tiers of tenants. Is there a tenant that if they call you, the use is just like no every single time?

Jeffrey Rosenberg (18:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, there are. There are tenants that are more difficult to deal with than other tenants and other tenants are easier to deal with. We are completely vertically integrated. So we do everything ourselves. And so we have a full team that does leasing, property management, construction, legal, asset management. You know, we do all of our accounting and reporting. And so we have

this built out team. we have 90 individuals around the country that manage their properties with us. And they have very close relationships with almost all of our tenants. And they have a good understanding of what the usual requests are for tenants for spaces. so there are there is, I would say the only bad tenant would be a tenant who doesn't pay rent.

Aviva (18:50)
Sure.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (19:04)
So, you know, so not getting rent is not a good thing, as you probably well know. But I would say that there are certainly in in the shopping centers that we own, there are tenants that are more desirable for the product mix that we have in that shopping center compared to other tenants. So for example, vape shops, I don't think we have any vape shops in our shopping centers.

Aviva (19:08)
Yes.

That's what I was going for.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (19:29)
Right?

And so we own one of the, one of the, I call vanity purchases. We purchased three ski villages. So we own the ski village at Copper Mountain. We own the ski village at Snowshoe, which is in West Virginia. And then we own the ski village at Stratton Mountain, which is in Vermont. And so those, call them a little bit vanity purchases because they were, because we.

you know, like the ski and there was an opportunity for us to buy those retail villages and it's all retail. And so we did, but they, they're, that's a different product and it's an interesting product. And I would say that they're, because it's seasonal, they're more difficult to deal with.

Aviva (20:15)
Wow. As someone who listens to different niches day in and day out, that is a new one. That's fascinating.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (20:23)
It's a very interesting niche. mean, it's something we have desired to be in. We support the programs. There's a lot of marketing and there's a lot of customer service. It's a fun niche. We all go to the mountains that we own the villages in and we spend time there. And we have great relationships with the operators of the mountains, which would be, know, whether it's Altera that owns.

know, snowshoe or stratum or powder that owns copper. But very different retail environment. think we bought them because we liked skiing and not necessarily because we thought they were going to be great investments. They've turned out to be good investments, but it's an interesting play for us because that's definitely not big box retail.

Aviva (20:56)
Yeah.

Nonetheless, a great reason to dust off your skis.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (21:10)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Good reason to come to Colorado. know, copper, we always pass through Denver and we're always in Colorado, so it's fun.

Aviva (21:19)
Absolutely. Mr. Rosenberg, what makes you happy with what you do? Aside from clearly making your grandparents very, very proud.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (21:22)
Yes.

Yeah, my grandparents, I think about my grandfather a lot because, you know, when he used to drive around buying land and building supermarkets without any demographics, without any formal training, I mean, he finished sixth grade, right? And so, and that was it. And today we have all this interesting information that we use. But what makes me happy really is providing a

clean, safe environment for people to shop. And so, you when I walk around, I like the feel of real estate. I like so and you probably do the same thing third generation, you walk around, you feel the building, you feel the solidness. So this is not stocks and bonds where it's in an account with a, you know, with a little line item as to what it's worth. It's physical, it's you can see it, and it's impactful to people, right? So what you do provides value.

to others through a very physical way. And so, you know, our shopping centers are well lit, they're clean, they're safe, they provide a good shopping environment for our customers, and that's what makes me happy.

Aviva (22:39)
Wow. Love it. I loved here. I get it. have, if you see behind me, I have a picture of the first warehouse my grandfather ever bought. And trust me, I get it. I get it.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (22:53)
And you walk around and like feel the solidness of the warehouse and say, wow, this is this is solid. This is real. This is life.

Aviva (22:56)
Absolutely.

yeah, I have a funny, I made this like really heartfelt post on LinkedIn about how it's my, you know, these warehouses are the legacy and I walk on the concrete and I feel the legacy and then I got a call from a local broker. I saw your LinkedIn post. Do you want to sell? It was like, no. Like, did you read the post? But there was no, trust me, I get it.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (23:20)
Right.

Aviva (23:25)
It's really special and there's, you know, we always say, not a lot of things more powerful than paid off real estate. So.

Jeffrey Rosenberg (23:32)
Yeah,

I would agree. And we're providing value to people. We're providing, you know, I hope we provide happiness through the services that we provide. And we try to, you know, to continue the legacy that was created from both our grandparents, years ago.

Aviva (23:36)
Yeah.

Yep. I love it. Mr. Rosenberg, for the listeners, where can they find you, follow you, learn more about Big V, et cetera?

Jeffrey Rosenberg (23:54)
death.

Okay,

well you can go to bigv.com and we've got all the information about ourselves there. We are just continuing to acquire assets around the United States and we continue to love the assets that we have. Feel free to visit some of our shopping centers if you look online. We own The Rim in San Antonio, Texas, which is the, I think the number one visited

outdoor center in Texas. So it's about a million square feet. So it's a big center. We own some centers outside of Nashville, Tennessee and in Phoenix, Arizona. So all sorts of fun places. Please feel free to go look, send us a message, email. You can see our team members, but yeah, we really...

We are a group of professionals that love what we do.

Aviva (24:56)
Love to hear it. get it. Mr. Rosenberg, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a blast. I think we brought the listeners a ton of value. Everybody go check out bigv.com and for everybody listening, we'll see you next week.