Let’s talk about landlords.

Often when we start considering retail spaces, Pedal Retailers express some version of this concern about large, corporate landlords: won’t they try to take advantage of us as a small business?

The image in their minds is that corporate landlords are like this:

While individual or mom-and-pop landlords are like this:

But having worked on more deals than any human should, we know that in many cases, the big corporate landlords can actually be like this:

And that mom-and-pop landlords can also be like this:

It makes total sense for small retailers (especially those navigating brick-and-mortar for the first time) to assume that corporate landlo...

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about how retail really exists on the front lines of American culture and society. I’m no economist, but I think it has to do with the fact that how we choose to spend (or not spend) money is a real-time reflection of our priorities and preferences. Put all of us together making many small financial decisions (and transactions) on a daily and weekly basis, and the impact is hard to ignore.

Retail takes it in the face first.

Let’s think of some of the recent cultural “events,” and let’s exclude COVID. We’re all painfully aware of how the retail industry was first in line to be decimated by COVID, but that’s a circumstance that is ...

Our society is so polarized that we can disagree on some of the most fundamental topics, like whether The Righteous Gemstones is a genius work of art (it is), or whether life is worth living without cheese (it is not).

Still, there are a few baseline things we can all agree on:

No one wants to be taken advantage of

Everyone likes a good deal

In retail real estate, your best safeguard against #1 is to use a reputable retail real estate broker. But #2 is tricky, because when it comes to brick-and-mortar business, your “good deal” is almost certainly not my “good deal”.

Your broker’s job is to ensure that the deal you’re considering is within the realm of normal for your m...

Every so often we hear from clients concerns along the lines of, "so-and-so told me that NO ONE will invest in my business until I have a signed lease."

And every time we hear that, the alarms start ringing in our brains. Here's why...

1. There are very few (if any) things in life that "NO ONE" will do. People regularly compete in hot dog eating contests. People have tigers for pets. People get married for the seventh time. You should automatically be skeptical of claims about what "everyone" or "no one" will do. Listen to what the person is telling you, but stay calm, and don't let those claims psych you out or have you thinking that there is only one way to do something. This advice appl...

A couple months ago I read The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. Did you read it too? It seems like a lot of us did.

Like most everything I encounter, there were a few elements that made me think of retail leasing. To be clear, I don’t always think of leasing per se — that would be weirdly specific — but I DO have built in “retailer vision” which I can’t seem to remove. 

Well that’s what happened with The Wager, when at one of the most suspenseful parts of the tale, my mind went to the LOI and leasing process.

If you haven’t yet read it yet, here’s the part of the story you need to know for my point to make sense:

In the late 1700s, a bunch of sti...

Recently, a Pedal Retailer who is very close to lease execution said they were taken aback by how long, involved and challenging the whole process has been. They’d heard it many times before they started (from us and from others), but still it was somehow way more…well, everything…than they expected.

As is my modus operandi, I scanned my brain for the most apt metaphor, and since my home office looks straight into an eight-year-old’s hot mess of a bedroom, guess what metaphor popped up?

The Three Little Pigs 🐷

If you recall, The Three Little Pigs is a fable — a short story meant to teach us an important moral. Ostensibly the story is about working hard (the pigs) and greed (the wolf), b...

Okay, before we start, let me just acknowledge how much I hate the fact that I’m using a woman’s aging as the centerpiece of this article, but you all already know that I do my part in smashing the patriarchy AND I love a perfect metaphor. So here we are.

I saw this meme the other day about how Anne Hathaway looks pretty much exactly like she did 20 years ago. Now we all know why that’s the case, right? Clearly the woman won the genetic lottery, but she’s also been “investing” in maintaining her 19-year-old face since she was 19.

Now I’m sure this meme was trying to sell me something to stick in or on my face, but do you know what the image mashup made ME think of? You guessed it. Reta...

Did you ever have one of those nifty decoder rings as a kid? A simple gadget that hovered over seemingly incomprehensible text or symbols would reveal its true meaning. ✨Magical✨ Don't you wish you had one of those for your leases (and to decode that look on your spouse's face when you put on the orange sweatpants…again)?

Anyway, sweatpants aside, I think we’ve cracked the case on the leases!

It's hard to sit down with an 65 page lease and read ALL of it. We hear it all the time, “An Act of God forcing me to close my business? That’ll never happen to me!” Umm, remember 2020? Still, you’re not entirely wrong. There are a lot of crazy sounding things in a lease that’ll likely never come to...