LAS VEGAS — As president and CEO of asset services at The Woodmont Company — which manages about 18.5 million square feet of retail centers, enclosed regional malls and outlet centers almost exclusively on a third-party basis — Fred Meno has had a front-row seat to the store closures and retail repurposing projects that have defined the market in the e-commerce era. Meno, whose company is based in Fort Worth, specializes in work that has afforded him the opportunity to see the big picture, to grasp the most in-depth reasons behind why certain retail categories are failing and why others are thriving. In some cases, that’s a factor of what types of retail uses are featured in certain types of properties. In others, it’s a matter of the retailer entering into a highly leveraged buyout deal to appease shareholders and gain additional time to right-size its stores and reshape its strategy. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of not adapting quickly enough to game-changing technology that can take the industry by storm. REBusinessonline.com sat down with Meno last week in Las Vegas during RECon, which attracted more than 30,000 retail real estate professionals, to pick his brain on what the future …
