Information presented to the standing-room-only crowd of more than 400 people at Nick & Sam's in Dallas' Uptown area included the fact that that area-wide retail occupancy is 87.6% and inventory is 171 million square feet according the Weitzman Gruop. Absorption during 2008 across the Metroplex was 1.7 million square feet, with 4.6 million square feet more in the pipeline.

"We've done almost everything right in terms of new construction," commented Bob Young, managing director of brokerage services with the locally based Weitzman Group during the presentation. "We learned the hard way that it doesn't pay to build centers with little or no pre-leasing. New construction is demand-driven." As a result, there isn't a glut of retail space on the market to worry about on top of everything else.

Many of those lessons learned, Young said, came from hard consequences in the 1980s, during which a plethora of two-story mid-block retail centers were financed, then built. As a result, when the late 1980s downturn hit, the area was stuck "with a bunch of junk that never should have been built," he remarked.