CBRE’s Kampler Takes the ‘High Street’

NEW YORK CITY-To Nina Kampler, who’s just been named senior managing director of New York tristate retail services for CB Richard Ellis as well as head of the company’s Urban Retail Group in the Americas, the two platforms dovetail neatly. “What I’m trying to do in New York is also what I’m trying to do in Urban Retail markets,” she tells GlobeSt.com.

Namely, she’ll be in charge of integrating the tristate region into the national platform, while at the same reinforcing the Urban Retail platform “with New York City as the number one marketplace or key portal to this country,” she says. “The idea is that whether it’s New York tristate or the Americas, it should also be part of what is going on in the rest of the globe.”

CBRE’s Urban Retail Group focuses on downtowns in key markets both domestically and globally, ranging from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto in the Americas to London, Milan and Hong Kong overseas. Kampler, who comes to CBRE from Hilco Real Estate, aims to build on the Urban Retail platform put in place by Anthony Buono, executive managing director of CBRE Retail Services.

Over the course of 25-year retail career, and particularly during her years as VP of retail for Polo Ralph Lauren Corp., Kampler says she’s often heard it said that it’s difficult to integrate retail strategies across separate markets. “That may be true if you’re comparing New York and Chicago to secondary and tertiary markets anywhere,” she says. “But we’re not. We’re focused on the ‘high street’ urban retail.”

She says you’ll find “a lot of synergy and overlap” between Michigan Avenue and Rodeo Drive. “The customer may be wearing winter clothing in Chicago and summer clothing in Beverly Hills, but the pocketbook she’s carrying at her elbow has the same amount of cash and probably the same sensibility,” Kampler says.

Whether a given retailer should be in both Chicago and L.A “depends on what they’re selling and what the fashionability is,” she says. “But the point is that it’s focused on high street urban retail, as distinguished from what’s everywhere in all 50 states. There is a distinct strata that can be examined, and it’s the perfect opportunity to create a really global market.”

Compared to “the hurricane” that hit commercial real estate in 2008 and 2009, “the landscape is somewhat settled” at present, says Kampler. “There are very few retail bankruptcies, there’s a deceleration of store closings and downsizing, and yet most retailers haven’t taken the deep, deep plunge to grow exponentially. They’re still waiting for further settling, and in some cases for capital to become unfrozen.”

Nonetheless, Kampler says she sees momentum building. It’s her sense, she adds, that “over the next two to four quarters, things are going to start happening.”

Although she jokes that she’ll have to create “a clone Nina” to manage both aspects of her new responsibilities, Kampler says they’re in fact complementary. “New York is a separate role because of its size,” she says. “It’s a gigantic market, but it meshes from an aspiration point of view with urban retail.”