Gar Herring and 9 of his employees have joined JLL, bringing international retail repositioning strength to the global company.
Herring has been the CEO of Dallas-based retail investor/developer MGHerring, which has developed more than 35M SF across 30 shopping centers around the U.S. and Mexico in the past 35 years. It was founded by his father, M.G. Herring, who died in 2016, and in recent years has been known for buying and turning around distressed shopping centers.
Herring will be a senior vice president of development within JLL's retail team and will work to expand its development and redevelopment services across the U.S. The decision is three years coming — talks cropped up now and then for the last few years but it just kept not being quite the right time or quite the right fit, Herring said. Then at ICSC in May, they decided to go through with it.
The move is not quite a merger; MGHerring will still exist as an owner and investor in retail and retain ownership of its current portfolio, and Herring will remain as CEO.
But MGHerring will turn over management of two properties to JLL: the 1M SF Silver City Gallleria in Taunton, Massachusetts, and the 515K SF Market Street at Heath Brook in Ocala, Florida. These distressed properties were purchased and redeveloped in partnership with Tricom Real Estate Group, and that ownership entity will remain in place. The general managers, accountants and operations managers at those assets — 10 people — have moved to JLL's ranks.
The 784K SF Golden Triangle Mall in Denton, Texas, will remain under the leasing and management of Weitzman, which partnered on the acquisition with MGHerring.
“This move to JLL allows me to focus on my passion for the development and redevelopment of retail properties across the country,” Herring said. “The MGHerring Group has traditionally performed all third-party services for the projects we own, but now we’ve engaged JLL to use their tremendous people and dynamic resources to achieve greater efficiencies and increase the NOI on our existing projects.”
Herring will be a panelist at Bisnow's full-day Retail South conference Sept. 11.
CORRECTION, SEPT. 6, 2:41 P.M. CT: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of MGHerring employees. Ten employees, including Gar Herring, are moving over to JLL. It also did not accurately portray the future of Golden Triangle Mall, which will not be managed by JLL. The story has been updated.
