Retailers and Brokers Have Learned to Look Past the Headlines: ICSC Attendees

If there’s one thing the retail market isn’t flinching over these days, it’s the spectral threat of global events, attendees at the first day of ICSC New York 2025 on Wednesday said.

Retailers, brokers and landlords aren’t suffering from any imagined injuries from trade wars or constrained consumer spending. Instead, attendees said they are pressing forward in deal-making and are expanding their footprints across the U.S..

After all, most of them have survived the pandemic, historically high inflation, escalating wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration’s return to the White House.

In the words of Avison Young’s Meghann Martindale, “Volatility is the new norm,” and that seems to be the case for credit-maxed consumers as well as the industry serving them.

More Americans may be spending less or paying for their holiday shopping on credit, but retailers are making up for the difference from wealthier shoppers, according to JLL’s Naveen Jaggi.

“I think the fundamentals haven’t changed in that you have a small part of the population spending an outsize amount in the market, so 10 percent of the households represent about 50 percent of the retail spending of Americans — that’s a pretty significant delta,” Jaggi told Commercial Observer on Wednesday. “[But retailers] have to keep a close eye on the consumers, because that may impact the speed at which they open stores.”

Retailers have already planned their real estate strategies for 2026 and 2027, and they will likely execute them unless there’s a COVID-like event or an expansion of the wars abroad that have been holding the public’s attention in recent years.

“I have a personal concern that you get to the spring of `26 and, if we have any more global uneasiness around tariffs not being settled and trade wars, it’s going to start impacting the consumer,” Jaggi said. “It doesn’t matter how much you cut interest rates. If customers don’t have money in their pockets and they feel uneasy with their jobs, they won’t spend.”

Martindale acknowledged that the consumer spending trends are not exactly healthy in the long run for the greater good, and that it’s possible that a bubble is ready to pop, but there will continue to at least be transactions on the capital markets side of the business from people needing to make a move in the market.

There’s still strong demand from a tenant point of view, and there isn’t an ongoing and significant wave of store closures.

“Even if the consumer softens and even if the job market continues to weaken, outside of some major catastrophic event, there’s so much pent-up demand and people who kicked the can starting in 2020 on buying or selling real estate,” Martindale said. 

“People have been sitting on the sidelines and they can’t do that anymore,” she said. “They have capital that they need to deploy, or they have assets that they need to sell.”

Martindale also noted that tenants are no longer sticking with brokerages purely out of loyalty, but are taking a more agnostic approach by shopping around for the right professionals to execute their plan. 

A lack of broker loyalty isn’t the only sign the retail system is unsettled.

“I think that as a market and as a society we’ve gotten to a point where we’re forced to embrace the chaos,” Adam Palmer from CBRE said. “Headlines haven’t been as likely to direct an entire market as it has been in the past, but I still feel like there’s room for growth when you look at the macro perspective of the U.S. economy or the U.S. commercial real estate market.”

Mark Hallum can be reached mhallum@commercialobserver.com.