In a studio segment of The Big Biz Show, the hosts welcomed Chris Clifford, a partner at Cast Capital Partners, and spent much of the conversation on the early years of a commercial real estate career, when new brokers work long hours for little pay. Asked about destination retail, Clifford said retail in Las Vegas used to mean a trip to a large grocery store and maybe an outparcel, while after COVID people want places to lounge and spend time. He described a shared gathering space his team calls the "communal interaction district" and argued that keeping visitors on a property for hours, where they might exercise, get a coffee at Barista Botanist and then shop for a lamp, carries a return of its own.
Clifford said Cast Capital is a brokerage with teams in San Diego and Las Vegas doing tenant and landlord representation, and that it also takes on its own developments. That, he said, is what The Cliff has become: finding projects and "creating something new that was old." On the future of brick-and-mortar retail, he said it comes down to being a destination, and that during COVID the local and regional tenants were easier to work with than the national ones.