TRANSCRIPT

Robert Burke:

We work with the Taubman group and worked on the Beverly Center, which had become quite dated. Then the Taubman group spent over half a billion dollars and reinventing [Beverly Center] and you know where there was a Capital Grille, which was a very dead restaurant and where Hard Rock Cafe had been… we put the Webster of Miami there. Sir David Adjaye was the architect, who did an incredible façade and the interior for the store. And we see that kind of repositioning, you know, from taking a Capital Grille, which is kind of a dead restaurant to being the Webster and it sends a message on the street. Inside there's a multi-brand [store] called Traffic and Tom Dixon the architect out of London design, that I think spending the money on on making things unique and special. When we started talking about food, Bill Taubman said, “I don't want any chain restaurants. In fact, I want only local restaurants that relate to the to the customer there, in LA. I don't want to speak down to them and bring in international chains.” And so, he spent a lot of time going to the downtown market in LA and bringing in food concepts… which were not just fancy food concepts but like Eggslut would have lines out the door. I think making those things very customized and understanding your customer is key.

In Nashville Tennessee, where we work [with the Taubman group] at the Green Hills Mall… we have Warby Parker, we have Peloton, we have Untuckit, you know these things that were direct-to-consumer have offered excitement. And I think about pop-ups and how important pop-ups are in driving customers to come in and shop.

You know if we look at China, there are three malls that we follow closely, which are part of the Taubman group and they have now been open for nine weeks. One [of the three] is not far from where the pandemic started, about an hour away. They have been in very, and this is in China, have been very diligent with temperature checks as people come in - staff and customers. They have hospital-grade cleaning units that go through during the day - and the customers like seeing and that everyone's required to wear a mask. So they’ve taken it quite seriously and we’ve seen a return in business, and in fact, they were up to last year's business… anniversary of last year's business last week. And the week before that they were 10% down, and then when they opened they were 40% down, but after a couple weeks… so we are seeing a return now, that's China.