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Summary: Realberry’s Todd Parker and Amanda Steinle explain why grocery-anchored centers are drawing investor attention, how placemaking, anchor quality, and location shape their approach, and which risks remain. This content is educational only and is not investment advice.

Retail has had a bad reputation for years. In parts of the industry, it is nearly a bad word. So why are grocery-anchored centers, shopping centers built around a supermarket, getting a second look? The short answer is that they are tied to a weekly habit, not a discretionary trip. The longer answer runs through this article.

Todd Parker, Vice President of Development, and Amanda Steinle, Vice President of Commercial and Mixed-Use Development, lead commercial mixed-use projects at Realberry, a Denver-based firm with roughly 35 years of experience. They shared what they see in the retail market in a recent webinar presented in partnership with CRE Daily. What follows is educational. It reflects their views, not forecasts, and it is not investment advice or an offer to sell securities.

A Complicated Decade

Todd describes retail’s past decade as complicated. After the pandemic, consumer demand shifted toward a different kind of retail experience. Formats that listened and adapted have seen success, while some older models have felt pain.

An audience poll on views from five years ago came back almost evenly split. Amanda recalled why many investors hesitated: land values were unsettled, construction costs and interest rates were rising, and many projects no longer penciled, meaning the numbers stopped working. Interest in the sector, she said, is now returning.

Realberry, formerly known as McWhinney, develops, acquires, and manages assets across multifamily, hospitality, commercial, industrial, and master planned communities. Development, acquisitions, asset management, and investment management are handled in-house, and Todd says the team thinks in decades, not quarters.

What the Numbers Show

Amanda points first to tight vacancy. JLL reported U.S. retail vacancy holding at 4.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, which means roughly 96 of every 100 square feet were occupied. In the same quarter, net absorption, the net change in occupied space, was negative 4.4 million square feet.

How can vacancy hold steady while occupied space shrinks? New supply is at historic lows, JLL noted, and vacated spaces are being re-leased. In Amanda’s view, the story is turnover, not contraction. CRE Daily later reported that vacancy held at 4.4 percent in the second quarter, with net absorption rebounding to 10.2 million square feet.

Supply is a second piece. Colliers forecast that new retail construction would fall 37 percent in 2026. Less new space may support rents and occupancy for existing centers. These are snapshots and forecasts, not guarantees, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Conditions can change at any time and without notice.

Retail Is Not All the Same

Todd cautions that saying retail is back is too simple. The idea that retail is dead was overstated, he says, but the recovery is not shared equally. Retail is evolving. Experiential formats that fit how people live are doing well, while formats that depend on destination trips and discretionary goods are under more pressure. The common thread, he says, is whether consumers choose to make a trip or need to make one.

He also sees a shift from selling goods to selling services and experiences. Fitness studios, medical services, salons, and food and beverage concepts are driving many early leases. Combining daily needs with daily wants, in his view, is what separates the centers that perform from those that lag.

Why Grocery Anchors Stand Out

An anchor is the largest tenant, the one that draws shoppers to everyone else. Todd notes that a grocery trip happens weekly, sometimes several times a week, whatever the economy or consumer mood. Few retail formats generate that built-in rhythm without heavy marketing spend.

Grocers are also growing. JLL’s 2026 Grocery Tracker reported that Aldi opened 180 stores in 2025, and that Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods saw same-store visits rise 10.4 and 9.8 percent. Amanda adds that e-commerce has turned many grocery stores into pickup and fulfillment points, which may help insulate them from the substitution risk facing goods retailers, at least in what the team sees. Both value-focused and fresh-format grocers are growing, Todd says, and both have a place.

The same tracker found grocery-anchored centers at 4.0 percent vacancy versus 6.3 percent for non-anchored centers, a gap of 2.3 percentage points, with a 4.4 percent rent premium. In plain terms, comparable space commanded about $1.04 for every $1.00 elsewhere. Transaction volume for these centers rose 42 percent to nearly $11 billion, and institutional investors made up 27 percent of 2025 acquisitions.

The Co-Tenancy Flywheel

Amanda describes a flywheel. The anchor builds an environment that compounds its own traffic, and fitness studios, urgent care clinics, and salons cluster around it because the traffic helps justify their location and rent. Many tenants also require co-tenancy, a lease provision tying their commitment to other named tenants being in place. Tenants that drive each other make leasing a grocery-anchored center different from leasing a collection of separate stores.

Placemaking and Mixed Use

Amanda sees demand moving away from the mall and toward community nodes. Retail embedded in a residential area, like a neighborhood center, is performing well in her experience, and retail often follows rooftops, meaning new homes.

Mixed use adds more. Office and medical workers generate daytime traffic, while green spaces, gathering areas, and events extend how long people stay. Together they can turn a transactional trip into a destination, and a center with something for kids or a place to linger invites visitors to stay longer. Realberry points to Centerra, its master planned community in Loveland, Colorado, as a living example of the approach.

How Realberry Evaluates a Site

Every opportunity starts with where, Todd says. The team looks for markets with population in-migration, job and income growth, and residential demand, and for trade areas with enough rooftops to support a grocer. Incomes matter because they support a varied mix of fitness studios, specialty food, and personal services. The goal is not the cheapest real estate. It is the right real estate in the path of growth, in markets that may be more affluent five to ten years from now. Todd points to Colorado’s Front Range, where he and Amanda work, for its record of in-migration, rising incomes, and constrained suburban supply.

Amanda lists the core underwriting considerations, the work of evaluating a project’s costs, revenues, and risks: anchor quality, tenant mix, location, and supply constraints. Not all anchors are equal, she says, so the team weighs brand positioning, sales productivity, customer loyalty, and lease term. It also asks which type of grocer fits a market: value-focused grocers serve inflation-sensitive shoppers, while fresh-format grocers serve wellness-focused ones. Tenant placement matters too, since clustering synergistic uses encourages cross traffic. Events and community programming act as retention tools, and sites need visibility, easy access, and nearby housing, along with room to adapt or add density as conditions change.

Where the Risks Sit

No investment is without risk, Todd says, and grocery-anchored does not mean low risk. Leases expire, and anchor renewals are negotiated and may not occur. A grocer losing share to better-positioned competitors is a real risk. Negative absorption in early 2026 is a reminder that even a healthy market has rollover. The team stress tests assumptions on re-leasing timelines, costs, and rents.

Macro conditions also matter: interest rates, lending conditions, consumer confidence, and tariff uncertainty can all affect feasibility and performance. Todd’s answer is adaptability, paired with conservative underwriting, anchors that are diverse, durable, and expanding, and operational control through Realberry’s integrated platform.

Amanda adds adaptability. A fitness concept has a life cycle, so the team asks what a building becomes if that tenant leaves. Movie theaters are harder to reuse. Flexible demising walls, the walls between tenant spaces, let a 2,500-square-foot space grow to 5,000 when a larger tenant arrives.

Costs and Public Partners

Todd says mixed-use construction costs are hard to summarize in one number because residential, retail, and office differ, and costs vary by state. Pricing was largely flat for much of the past year, he notes, and increases are now appearing again. The team watches that closely as part of its fiduciary duty to manage risk.

Amanda says public-private partnerships have been central. A tax increment financing district uses future growth in property tax revenue to help pay for infrastructure such as streets, water, sewer, and parking. In her view, many retail projects would struggle to work without some public investment. A grocery anchor then draws interest from tenants who might not otherwise come.

The Takeaway

Todd sums it up this way: retail has restructured, and the survivors are leaner, more experiential, and more needs-based. Not all formats are equal, and he sees grocery-anchored retail combining recurring demand, e-commerce resistance, neighborhood integration, and co-tenancy dynamics. Grocery-anchored centers have shown a vacancy advantage, a rent premium, and higher investment volume, which Todd reads as a structural move, not a temporary one.

Amanda’s measure is simpler, and it echoes Realberry’s mission: create places people genuinely love, not just occupy.