FIRST DRAFT LIVE: America’s Shopping Surge Meets Retail’s Reality Check
Bisnow’s First Draft Live is a weekly series featuring live conversations about the critical stories impacting CRE right now — from market volatility and economic uncertainty to the growing influence of artificial intelligence. First Draft Live is a companion to The First Draft, Bisnow’s daily, flagship CRE newsletter. Register here to get The First Draft in your inbox. Subscribe to First Draft Live on Apple and Spotify, or scroll down to view in your browser.
America’s most infamous shopping day, Black Friday, just passed with some fairly impressive results.
Shoppers spent $11.8B online, which is an increase of 9.1% compared to last year, and they spent $6.4B on Thanksgiving. Despite these strong numbers, retail is still facing headwinds, including tariff whiplash, softening consumer sentiment, delayed imports, waves of closures, shrinking seasonal hiring and layoffs at major brands.
And while the U.S. CRE retail market posted positive net absorption of 4.7M SF in Q3, this came after two consecutive quarters of decline in the first half of the year.
Now that the holiday season is in full swing, will retailers continue to experience positive growth? Does the U.S. retail market have the strength to tackle whatever 2026 might have in store?
To find out, Bisnow Editor-In-Chief Mark F. Bonner spoke with Northwood Retail President Ward Kampf, who broke down what's real, what's noise and what CRE should brace for.
Kampf spoke on how artificial intelligence has made its impact on retail.
"You do have this new movement of artificial intelligence, whether it’s shopping, there’s a lot of social selling going on. Things are just different, the way people are selling,” Kampf said. “I do think the word uncertain is out there and that’s what makes people potentially pause. Instead of buying five things, they buy three.”
He also talked about how tariffs changed his plans for 2025.
"I’ve got three or four key openings in certain centers that should have opened this year and have been pushed to next year with tariffs and supply chain," he said. "That obviously affects rent commencement."
View the full conversation here:
