On January 26, ULI Washington’s Young Leaders Group (YLG) hosted ‘Exploring Opportunity in Experiential Retail’ at Five Iron Golf’s Penn Quarter location. The event, centered on exploring emerging trends, headwinds and recent development in experience-driven retail drew 70 professionals from across the real estate community. The event consisted of a panel followed by a virtual golf and networking session.

The panel was moderated by Holland & Knight’s Janice Schiff, who is Partner and Attorney with deep expertise in matters relating to experiential retail across the country. The panel itself consisted of the following:

• Jennifer Price, Principal at KLNB with extensive expertise representing owners as well as highly differentiated retail experiences such as CorePower Yoga, Barry’s Bootcamp, and other national and local tenants
• Gary Taubin, Vice President of Retail at CBRE
• Will Donohue, Vice President of Brokerage – Office at JLL

The panel’s combination of retail depth and office owner’s perspective lent itself to a riveting discussion on the typologies of experiential retail, new developments in the broader DMV area, lessons learned from prior activations, and factors and conditions that ultimately make a retail deal pencil.

Of the topics the panel dove into, below were three takeaways that we found insightful:

Experiential Retail Spatial Requirements

Experiential retail tenants, by the very nature of the space use, can make ideal placements for harder-to-lease spaces in office and mixed-use projects i.e., below-grade, ground floor space that are not aligned with typical office tenants.

Comparatively Higher TI

Experiential retail tenants require comparatively higher TI to outfit a space per the unique programming elements needed to facilitate a tenant’s brand and experiential identity. This makes places the unit economics of an opportunity effortful to work out, even though fundamentally the potential retail tenant may be a good fit for the space.

Impact on Walkthrough and Building Tour Experience

Because experiential and other retail tenants can occupy below-grade and street-level space, placing this kind of tenant in an office building creates vibrance and a sense of life that is conducive to a memorable and differentiated office tour experience. JLL’s Will Donohue added that “you didn’t have to turn on the lights as you walked through a space” due to the buzz of activity already in place, and potential tenants found that the combined activity and anchor retail made a particular building shown out of many memories.

At the conclusion of the panel, we opened the 5Iron golf simulators to the attendees, which consisted of a virtual range, a long drive contest, and a closest to the pin contest. Attendees were able to share in the kind of retail experience that the panel unpacked in addition to a closing networking session.

We would like to thank our sponsors Beacon Capital, whose generous sponsorship made this event possible and accessible to ULI Washington’s members, and Holland & Knight who sponsored the prizes for both competitions.

Lastly, we extend our gratitude to our panelists for providing their time and expertise, and to the ULI Washington Staff that helped coordinate the event.