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When you think of iconic shopping streets across the country no tour would be complete without a visit to Newbury Street Boston. 

http://www.wcvb.com/article/retail-roundup-new-newbury-street/19636870

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Corey Bialow is the founder and CEO of Bialow Real Estate, which is a full-service real estate consulting firm dedicated to servicing the expansion needs for regional and national retailers throughout the country. Bialow is considered an expert in the field of retail tenant representation, having been engaged in the real estate profession for approximately 20 years. He has an extremely diverse background with experience in leasing, management, Development, and investing in almost all aspects of real estate including residential, commercial, retail, and industrial.

Bialow Real Estate has established a very unique niche for themselves, as they primarily work with clients that lack the internal resources of a full-service real estate department and see outsourcing as a more efficient and effective way to manage their expansion plans. Many of today’s leading retailers have retained their services including The Vitamin Shoppe, Pinkberry, Performance Bicycle, Wendy’s, Johnny Was, Select Comfort, Maidenform, For Eyes Optical, Six Flags-Coaster Cuts, Naked Pizza, Massage Envy, etc.

Bialow has built his business model on differentiating himself from the typical brokerage company that is primarily transaction based and focused solely on brining two parties together to complete a deal. Bialow Real Estate only represents retailers, not landlords, and in most instances they essentially act as an extension of the company as their “real estate department.” They are involved with every facet of the expansion process including strategic planning, market analysis, site selection, lease negotiations and coordination of the construction on through to store opening. They pride themselves on solely focusing upon the needs of the tenant and take a long-term, “big picture” approach to the deal making process.

Prior to founding Bialow Real Estate, Bialow served for over eight years as vice president of real estate and construction for one of the largest growth retailers in the country, The Vitamin Shoppe. He joined The Vitamin Shoppe when it was in its infancy in terms of growth. He was solely responsible for establishing their real estate department and taking the retailer from a local New York City chain with only 20 stores to what is now a 500-store public company operating coast to coast. The Vitamin Shoppe has continued to retain the services of Bialow Real Estate as their exclusive master broker nationally, and Bialow continues to personally oversee all of their expansion efforts on an outsourced basis.

Prior to this position, Bialow spent close to three years as director of real estate for the International retail chain, Blinds to GO based out of Montreal, Canada. During his tenure, he successfully opened over 60 stores throughout the United States and Canada and was instrumental to establishing and implementing their entree into the American marketplace.

Bialow’s background also includes experience as a retail broker and financial accountant, having worked for Cushman & Wakefield at their Corporate International Headquarters in New York City and Ripco Real Estate Corp., a retail brokerage firm based in Long Island, New York.

Bialow is also an avid investor, having been a partner in a New York/New Jersey-based restaurant group and is an active real estate developer and owner of several shopping centers and net leased properties throughout the United States. Bialow Real Estate has recently partnered with Coda Development, a Boston-based residential builder to establish a residential arm of the company. They are focused primarily on residential construction and rehabs of single-family homes and condominiums within the metro west area of Boston.

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Bialow Real Estate is a full-service real estate consulting firm dedicated to servicing the needs of retailers — local, regional and national retailers. Bialow provides all of the traditional functions of an internal real estate department including strategic planning, market analysis, site selection, lease negotiations and coordination of the fit out or construction process on through to store opening.

“We have our own network of about 50 different brokers in each major MSA in the country,” said Corey Bialow, the company’s CEO. “We connect the brokers with our clients and work as the master broker. An advantage to this is cost savings. When you hire us as your real estate team, the broker pays us when deals are signed. Retailers get our services basically for free.”

Chain Store Age recently asked Corey Bialow to talk about the retail real estate trends he sees from his vantage point today. Here’s what he had to say.

What consulting services are your retail clients asking from you today?

Before the recession, retailers were focused on growth. For the past few years since the recession, retailers want our help in repositioning existing store portfolios by right-sizing store portfolios and store square footages. They have edited their merchandise selections and remerchandised their stores.

A number of retailers are using the Internet to do this. If you once had a 10,000-sq.-ft. prototype, today, you might be more efficient with a 5,000-sq.-ft. prototype plus a warehouse that fulfills Internet orders.

When growth does return, do you think that today’s powerful site analysis and selection technologies will produce better performing stores?

I don’t think you can replace boots on the ground with technology. Don’t get me wrong, I want as much data as I can get. But technology and data are tools and not decision makers.

Where the technology is great is the macro level. Suppose you want to roll out your stores to cover the Baltimore metropolitan market. Technology can show you on a macro level where your customers are.

But I think there are too many variables to trust sales volume models. You might find through modeling that a particular location should produce a million dollar store. But the model doesn’t take the site’s physical characteristics into consideration. Poor parking will ruin an otherwise good location. What if a competitor opens a store down the block? There are lots of variables. To find them, you have to walk the site and evaluate it yourself.

What advice can you give to retailers trying to expand in today’s increasingly expensive landlord’s market?

It is a landlord’s market in the good retail corridors, and retailers need to understand how strong the competition for good space is. We recently put in an offer at the asking rent for a prime end-cap space in a prime retail corridor. The landlord received 10 offers. That’s how much demand for space outweighs the available supply today. In this kind of market, if you find a good space, don’t over-analyze it. Take it. Many of our clients are opening a store every week. There is no time to negotiate for every last nickel. In this landlord’s market, rents are at an all time high, and if you don’t move fast, you’ll lose deals to those who do move fast.

While the recession is over, many retailers continue to struggle. When will this turn around?

I don’t think that struggling retailers are the story anymore. I don’t think the story is that RadioShack is closing stores or that Sears isn’t doing well. The real story — what we often don’t hear about in the media — is that some retail segments are growing very aggressively. Fast-casual food service is on fire, for instance. So are health spas. The mobile phone businesses are opening lots of stores. CVS and Walgreens are growing rapidly with their urgent care concepts. These are the kinds of stories we should be hearing about. Some segments are seeing tremendous growth.

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