Here's one lesson Cheri Cook has learned over decades in retail real estate: The right relationship can unlock deals that no amount of cold outreaching ever will.
Cook, a commercial real estate broker known for finding new revenue streams in shopping centers, has built a career on spotting overlooked value by turning corridors, rooftops and parking lots into income-generating space.
That instinct — and her network — paid off in one of her most memorable wins: securing a deal with Amazon as the e-commerce giant experimented with brick-and-mortar retail.
“It was a fabulous concept, but it was literally relationships. You know the right people and you trust them.”
At the time, Seattle-based Amazon was rolling out kiosks to showcase products such as Fire tablets, Kindle readers and Alexa-enabled speakers, creating a rare opportunity for mall owners to monetize common areas.
Cook, then overseeing specialty leasing and common-area initiatives for Taubman Realty Group before Simon Property Group took full ownership of Taubman's mall portfolio, saw the opening early.
But getting in front of Amazon wasn’t straightforward.
"We were hearing about this and [wondering] how you get in touch with Amazon?" Cook said.
Instead of starting from scratch, Cook leaned on an existing relationship — a broker she had worked with on more than 95 deals who also represented Amazon.
“Can we do some deals?” she recalled asking regarding Amazon.
The result, Cook said, was a sweeping agreement to install custom-designed kiosks across the Taubman portfolio.
“It was a fabulous concept, but it was literally relationships,” Cook said. “You know the right people, and you trust them.”
Cook, who went on to found Detroit-based Elevate CRE Consulting, recently agreed to oversee ancillary-revenue strategy for Woodcliff Realty Advisors, led by ICSC veteran Rudy Milian, while maintaining her own practice.
Though Amazon ultimately decided to shut down its roughly 87 kiosks nationwide in 2019 as its physical retail strategy evolved, the deal remains instructive: In retail real estate, monetizing underused space often depends as much on industry connections as it does on creativity.
Today, Cook said, retail landlords are still finding new ways to extract value from common areas — from digital signage and food trucks to ghost kitchens, telecom leases and "automated retail," which, to non-real estate pros, means vending machines.