➤ SIGNAL
Retail’s recovery is being led by food, beverage, and experience — not goods.
Mixed-use campuses are leasing retail into office, not separating it.
The Sun Belt’s leasing momentum extends past housing into ground-floor retail.
While national headlines fixate on office distress, the ground floor of the right mixed-use asset is leasing. Central Park Post Oak — an office complex — is deepening its retail program because the live-work-play format still draws tenants when the location and the daytime population are there. Experiential and F&B concepts are taking the space that apparel and big-box once held.
The mix matters: chef-driven restaurants and entertainment (Funbox) are signing, not commodity retail. That’s the post-2020 retail thesis in practice — square footage flows to uses that can’t be bought online.
Grocery-anchored and experiential remain the two retail safe-harbors, but this is the experiential leg: well-located mixed-use with daytime traffic still commands leasing demand. For owners, the conversion play is amenitizing office with F&B — turning a vacancy problem into a retention tool.
Key Takeaways
- “Retail isn’t dying — it’s migrating to the uses a screen can’t replace. For owners, that reframes the vacancy problem: the empty box isn’t a retail failure, it’s a programming opportunity — chef-driven F&B and entertainment underwrite the foot traffic that apparel and big-box no longer can. The defensible square footage now is whatever pulls a daytime population through the door, and in well-located mixed-use that’s a retention tool for the office above it, not just a line on the rent roll.”
- “Source: CBisnow Houston Deal Sheet, Midway — June 12, 2026”
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