When a grocery anchor goes dark, the instinct is to panic and chase a like-for-like replacement as fast as possible. Both are usually mistakes.

In this episode, host Mike Law and Kevin Bissell get into what actually happens when an anchor leaves a center: why the first 90 days matter more than the vacancy itself, why the right backfill is often a completely different kind of grocer — or no grocer at all — and how to know the difference before you sign anyone.

In this episode:

• Why the anchor leaving isn't the disaster — it's the first 90 days afterward that decide whether a center recovers or quietly slides.
• Why the replacement is so often a different format of grocer — discount, specialty, quality-and-service, ethnic — rather than a like-for-like swap.
• When the right answer is no grocer at all, because the demographics under the box have shifted since the original lease was signed.
• How to read whether the trade area still supports a grocer before you go chasing one — and how a sales forecast tells you which one will actually work.
• The scramble-to-backfill mistakes that cost landlords and developers value, and the move that protects the center instead.

About the guest
Kevin Bissell is SVP of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, with decades in grocery and retail research — including leading research for one of the country's largest retail REITs and a top national grocery-research firm. He's built sales forecasts and market studies for retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities across all 50 states, much of it grounded in the fieldwork most firms no longer do.

About the show
The Ground Truth is a podcast for retail real estate operators, executives, and decision-makers. New episodes every two weeks. Hosted by Mike Law.

Sponsored by CRE360 Partners — a retail real estate research and advisory firm helping retailers, landlords, and municipalities make better expansion and leasing decisions.

Anyone can pull a dashboard. But the intelligence that actually decides a retail real estate deal — whether a store will hit its number, whether an anchor is as strong as it looks on paper — still comes from walking the store.

And almost nobody does it anymore.

In this episode, host Mike Law sits down with Kevin Bissell from CRE360 Partners to break down field research and store casing: the unglamorous, boots-on-the-ground work behind the most accurate sales forecasts in the business — and why the firms that skip it keep getting burned.

In this episode:

• The gap between what a dashboard shows you and what you learn standing inside the store — and why that gap separates a good forecast from a bad one.
• Why a store can rank top-10% in foot traffic and bottom-10% in actual sales — the basket-size problem that mobile-location data keeps getting wrong.
• How a single store manager can swing a location's volume 20% in either direction — and why that never shows up in the numbers.
• What Kevin is actually doing during a 10–15 minute walk through a store, and how it tells him whether it's a strong, average, or weak performer.
• Where AI and modeling stop: the tools can get a forecast most of the way there in minutes, but the last mile still takes someone who's been in the building.

About the guest
Kevin Bissell is SVP of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, with decades in grocery and retail research — including leading research for one of the country's largest retail REITs and a top national grocery-research firm. He's built sales forecasts and market studies for retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities across all 50 states, much of it grounded in the fieldwork most firms no longer do.

About the show
The Ground Truth is a podcast for retail real estate operators, executives, and decision-makers. New episodes every two weeks. Hosted by Mike Law.

Sponsored by CRE360 Partners — a retail real estate research and advisory firm helping retailers, landlords, and municipalities make better expansion and leasing decisions.

Why grocery anchors still win — with Kevin Bissell

For 35 years, Kevin Bissell has been walking grocery stores. Not the executive tour, not the quarterly analyst visit — the actual aisles, the back of the produce section, the parking lot at 11am on a Tuesday. He's the Senior Vice President of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, and he's spent three and a half decades building the kind of knowledge about grocery real estate that doesn't live in any database.

In this first episode of The Ground Truth, host Mike Law sits down with Kevin to ask a simple question: with e-commerce, delivery apps, and everyone predicting the death of physical retail, why does the grocery-anchored shopping center just keep outperforming?

The conversation goes deep on what Kevin actually looks for when he steps foot in a new market, why traffic data and cell-phone analytics only tell part of the story, and why regional grocers are quietly winning in markets where the national chains can't compete.

In this episode:

• Why the grocery anchor is still the traffic engine of the shopping center
• What Kevin looks at in the first hour of evaluating a new market
• The difference between a site's demographics on paper and what the ingress-egress actually looks like
• Why cell-phone traffic data is "10 pieces of a 20-piece jigsaw puzzle"
• What HEB is doing in Texas that most national grocers can't replicate
• The regional grocer comeback — and why understanding the local customer still wins
• The one thing landlords and developers most often get wrong about grocery anchors

About the guest

Kevin Bissell is SVP Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners. Before joining CRE360, Kevin led research at Weingarten Realty for 17 years and spent five years at MTN, the industry's premier grocery analytics firm. He's completed grocery sales forecasts and market studies for retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities across all 50 states.

About the show

The Ground Truth is a podcast for retail real estate operators, executives, and decision-makers. New episodes every two weeks. Hosted by Mike Law.

Sponsored by CRE360 Partners — a retail real estate research and advisory firm helping retailers, landlords, and municipalities make better expansion and leasing decisions.