Ozer Real Estate will provide client advisory and project management services to retailers including lease mitigation and renegotiation, designation rights, sourcing replacement tenants and lease valuations for third parties. David Peress, general counsel and managing director of the Ozer Group, will head up the new operation. "If you look at what's going on in mall-based retail market, there is a lot of consolidation and reconfiguration," he tells GlobeSt.com. "Now this is one more way we can help our clients with their excess or obsolete assets."

Peress notes that Ozer can make use of C&W's knowledge and real-time databases to understand what is going on with the mall retail market. "We manage obsolescence," he says. "We bring the retailer to the table. Cushman & Wakefield has tremendous valuation service. Many of our clients are looking for ways to leverage their balance sheet and real estate often has value. With a company like Cushman & Wakefield that has extensive market presence, they can realize value if it exists." Peress calls the alliance a "strategic" one and points out that the two companies are "leveraging off of each other's core competencies."

David M. Gialanella, C&W's executive vice president of retail services, agrees. "The best way to look at this is Cushman & Wakefield brings a delivery system that allows Ozer to look at property values and ways to dispose" of assets. He terms his company's function in this alliance as the "implementation arm. The business that Ozer is in is unique and distinct," he points out. "With inventory disposition expansion makes sense because what they do equates with real estate. It opens up an opportunity in a unique part of the retail business."