Rick Scardino has been active since heading up a new retail group for Lee & Associates of Illinois (moving from his own company,Affinity Commercial Real Estate). Specializing in land sales, product, and tenant rep for retail centers, Rick helped assemble the acreage for the first Walmart Supercenter development in metro Chicago (in Antioch) as well as the Chicago Premium Outlets  in Aurora. Chicago Premium Outlets required him to gather 140 acres of land, of which only 55 was developable. He grew up in the family restaurant biz and says it helps him anticipate the needs of people living in some of the outlying suburbs in the path of development.

Rick tells us he chose Lee because of its unique compensation structure as well as its collegial atmosphere. It was the right time to make a move, he says, because the hard work of land transactions, many of which take years, will happen during the recession. It’ll be a long time before we get back to the kind of growth we saw prior to the recession, he adds, but Rick anticipates 2010 will be a better year for retailers, and for housing in outlying suburbs like Montgomery  and  Yorkville, to start a slow process of rebound.