With 20 Years of ICSC Conventions Under Her Belt, RKF Veteran Karen Bellantoni Reigns Supreme in Vegas
By Jotham Sederstrom May 23, 2012 11:00 am
reprintsWhat actually does one do at these conventions?
There’s a bunch of time for people to eyeball stuff, to see what’s available. And it’s also a really good time to see what retailers are out there and who’s expanding. Sometimes there are no prototypes, where people will come out and say, we’re going to be doing XYZ and we’ve got 10 stories planned. So a lot of actual deal points don’t usually get done, but what happens is that you’re going to get lease plans or you’re going to get floorplans, and you know that you’re going to get a sense of the beginning of a negotiation. And that’s really what this is about because it really is, truly, speed dating.
Because almost every retailer is out in Las Vegas, there are some really great shopping centers, and it gives you the opportunity to really go out there and see what the presence is. I go to malls, I go to other cities because I do national work, but it gives everyone in our business the opportunity to get out there and see what’s happening on the retail level beyond just New York.
What do you think people will be talking about during ISCS RECon? What are the big trends?
I think that the developers are going to be doing what they always do, which is pushing a new [expansion].
There’s going to be a lot of focus on New York as a result of that.
The retailers will be talking about one another’s businesses, where else they’re expanding, so it’s a good time to network and share the information on what they’re doing. And I think the trend is … that people are cautiously still expanding nationally and in the urban markets, New York probably being the strongest.
What is RKF’s booth going to look like this year?
It’s nice, it’s very much like RKF. It’s clean, it’s corporate, but with a little bit of color. It’ll be very much like our website. I’m sort of making this up as I go, because I just realized I don’t even know. We’ll have nice flowers. And we have an area for bigger meetings where we could have almost like a conference room, and then we have a sitting area where we’re on a corner—and we’re across from Vornado—so a lot of people seem to gather, a lot of brokers from other companies seem to gather there, the guys from CB are constantly circling, the guys from Cushman you know, it seems like they’re always circling because of our location.
jsederstrom@observer.com
