Michael Berne  

Retail on Central Avenue - What's the right mix?

On October 24th, NE CDC sponsored a session with national retail consultant, Michael Berne. Click here to view his powerpoint presentation.

Michael Berne Biography
Michael J. Berne is the President and Founder of MJB Consulting, a national retail real estate consulting firm based in New York City. His firm is retained by a mix of public/non-profit and private sector clients across the country to undertake market studies, merchandise/tenant mix analyses, revitalization strategies, brand repositioning campaigns, tenant recruitment efforts, etc.

Berne focuses on downtown and main street business districts, and has worked on numerous projects where the goal was to strike a balance between chains and independents. Not only has he developed a proprietary database of the types of businesses and the national/regional chains that are willing to locate in various urban contexts, he has also devised a model for using analogs/comparables to uncover the potential for additional (non-chain) tenanting prospects in a given shopping area. In addition, he has created his own system for classifying urban business districts similar to that used by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) for identifying different types of suburban shopping centers.

Berne has written and spoken extensively on the subject of retail. He has penned numerous articles for Urban Land magazine, and composed a chapter for a forthcoming ULI-published book. In addition, he created his own course on “Urban Retail” and taught “Retail Real Estate”, “Market Analysis” and “Changing Dynamics of Real Estate” at the Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College (City University of New York), and he gives guest lectures at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Planning. He has spoken at the annual conferences of the National Main Street Center and the Connecticut Main Street Center, the Waterfront Center, the NYC Department of Small Business Services’ “Getting Down To Business” seminar, and Northeast Ohio’s ICSC Alliance Program. Finally, Berne has appeared in various high-profile publications such as The Financial Times, The Washington Post and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Download PDF flyer here.                                Home                       Download powerpoint presentation