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Guest: Brian Finnegan, CEO, Brixmor Property Group
Brian Finnegan is CEO of Brixmor Property Group. The company owns and operates roughly 350 open-air shopping centers.
Together, those properties total more than 60 million square feet. Most are grocery-anchored and serve everyday consumer needs.
Finnegan has led Brixmor’s strategy around tenant mix and redevelopment. He has also focused on necessity-driven retail that brings shoppers back each week.
Finnegan explains why grocery-anchored shopping centers have become one of the most resilient plays in commercial real estate. He breaks down what drives value today.
That includes tenant mix, redevelopment, and the economics of small shops versus anchor tenants. He also explains why new retail supply has largely disappeared.
Finally, Finnegan discusses how data and omnichannel strategies are reshaping the sector.
Key Takeaways
Even though anchors take up most of Brixmor’s square footage, small shops earn a per-square-foot rent multiple times higher, showing how much value concentrates in the small-shop portion of the rent roll.
“Our anchor rents are $13.50 or so, and our small shop rents are pushing close to $30.”
Brian Finnegan, [15:44]
Finnegan frames tenant mix as a self-reinforcing cycle: a strong anchor drives traffic, which lets surrounding small shops pay more rent, which funds further reinvestment in the center.
“There’s like a symbiotic aspect to retail, in the sense that if you bring a great anchor in, that’s gonna drive a lot of traffic — ultimately that’s gonna help the shops around it. They’re gonna be able to pay more rent, they pay more rent, allows us to continue to reinvest, and it’s this self-fulfilling cycle that tends to happen.”
Brian Finnegan, [16:13]
New ground-up retail construction stays rare because land economics for competing uses haven’t shifted, so rents would have to rise dramatically before new development pencils.
“We often get asked, what’s the catalyst for new development? I think it’s a long way off, just because of the nature of those factors — the price of land for other asset classes, or the value of land, that’s not changing anytime soon. So the rents just have to be at such a high level, they have to be essential.”
Brian Finnegan, [24:22]
Redevelopment, not new construction, is Brixmor’s main growth engine, with $150-200 million spent annually and roughly $1.4 billion put into the portfolio to date.
“Our redevelopment program is about $150 to $200 million a year. We’ve spent about a billion four on the portfolio today.”
Brian Finnegan, [30:56]
Anchor tenants have grown more receptive to fitness and wellness neighbors as they’ve come to see those customers overlap with their own, reversing an older reluctance rooted in protecting parking.
“What has changed over the last several years is a receptivity from anchor tenants to allow more density in terms of out parcels, to allow a wider range of uses. Historically they wouldn’t want fitness uses next door — because they were protective of their parking field, and there was this thought that if people were working out, they weren’t gonna go shop the store.”
Brian Finnegan, [32:20]
