BY BILLY GRAY

In the merely 13 years since its founding, the retail real estate brokerage Robert K. Futterman & Associates has been responsible for $20 billion worth of transactions. The firm’s chairman and chief executive, Robert K. Futterman, has helped tenants and landlords sign the dotted line on $10 billion worth of deals while making his company a presence in New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Jersey and San Francisco.

Mr. Futterman spoke to The Commercial Observer as he wrapped up prep work for the International Council of Shopping Centers’ chaotic New York conclave, sharing his thoughts on the past year and future of retail real estate, the rebound from Hurricane Sandy and Downtown’s increasingly amorphous boundary.

The Commercial Observer: This year the ICSC proceedings will run for two days, as opposed to three as it has in the past. Do you think this will improve the event?
Mr. Futterman: Can I tell you that my brokers are working Sunday? And really, they’re not going to stop until Thursday. So, yes within the confines of the Hilton, it’s two days. But the party starts this weekend. We have meetings, dinners, a cocktail party on Sunday. But it’s all ICSC-related. On Wednesday we’re out and about to do sight tours and to meet with landlords who aren’t attending the conference. Think about it: residential developers and office owners, your traditional New York landlords, don’t necessarily go to ICSC.

But in general, this week is a great time to meet people before everybody starts thinking about Christmas vacation. It’s a perfect time for deals to get started. I always say, at ICSC, nothing really gets done. Everything gets started. It’s our Super Bowl.

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BY BILLY GRAY

Microsoft is cashing in on the critical, but fleeting, holiday shopping season with two ephemeral New York retail outlets. The software giant’s local pop-up stores opened Oct. 27 in Times Square and at The Shops at Columbus Circle, and purport to ease seasonal shopping anxiety with a “curated” selection of the company’s best products.

But the holiday stores’ marquee piece will be Surface, the tablet that Microsoft shipped on the eve of the pop-ups’ opening. By pushing Surface using the pop-up platform, Microsoft is hewing to one of the retail model’s key tenets since it landed in New York about a decade ago.

Initially a form of stealth advertising and a way for retailers to wade into the waters of unfamiliar markets, pop-ups now increasingly qualify as retail events that attract, rather than chase, consumers and help make established companies seem hip rather than lend legitimacy to upstarts.

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BY BILLY GRAY

It was a Los Angeles-based company inspired by Japanese shopping habits that brought pop-up retail to America. During a trip to Tokyo in 1999, Russ Miller witnessed the lengths to which the city’s famously voracious consumers would go to buy rare and limited-edition products.

Mr. Miller brought that mind-set back to L.A. with Vacant, “a retail concept and exhibition store” that would open shops only to close them as soon as they ran out of goods.

Discount retailer Target once again positioned itself as the funky anti-Walmart when it took over a 220-foot-long boat at Chelsea Piers for a two-week stay on the Hudson River that coincided with Black Friday in November of 2002. Vacant arrived in New York in February 2003, working with Dr. Martens on a pop-up space at 43 Mercer Street (pictured, above).

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BY AL BARBARINO

Destroyed by severe flooding inflicted by Hurricane Sandy, Brookfield Office Properties has razed the 31,000-square-foot, sublevel retail concourse at 1 New York Plaza, with plans to rebuild the space and bring in new tenants, The Commercial Observer has learned.

The estimated 23-million-gallons of water that flooded the lower levels of the building were removed within a week of the storm’s touchdown on the southern tip of Manhattan.

But as of Monday night, multiple giant yellow tubes resembling something from an alien horror flick continued to pump warm air into the building’s retail center, The Plaza Shops, amid the rumbling of temporary generators.

“All of the water was removed within six days, and now those yellow ducts are feeding warm air to completely dry the space out,” Brookfield Office Properties spokesperson Matt Cherry told The Commercial Observer. “Obviously the retail was on the concourse level, which was hit hardest by the storm. We basically demolished the space, so the status of that right now isn’t certain.”

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BY BILLY GRAY

Avison Young won a promising assignment yesterday when Paramount Leasehold L.P. selected it as the exclusive office leasing agent for 1501 Broadway in Times Square. It is the Canadian agency’s first Manhattan leasing assignment since it opened a New York office in April.

The 33-story, 690,000-square-foot tower, also known as The Paramount Building, sits between 43rd and 44th Streets in the heart of Times Square. At street level the building currently houses retail tenants including Levi’s and the restaurants Hard Rock Cafe, Bubba Gump Shrimp and Carmine’s. “This building is a true New York City landmark and its location within the vibrant Times Square district provides tenants with excellent access to multiple modes of transportation, as well as proximity to first-rate hotels,” said Arthur J. Mirante, II, principal and tri-state president of Avison Young.

Paramount Leasehold has owned the Art Deco tower–a former movie palace and Paramount Pictures headquarters–for forty years. Inside the building are available office spaces ranging from a few hundred square feet to a 160,000-square foot block. The Paramount’s open, column-free floor plans could attract companies from the thriving tech sphere as they migrate north from their traditional Silicon Alley corridor.

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