Brandon Sedloff and Brian Kosoy explore the transformation of retail real estate from distressed contrarian bet to institutional favorite. Kosoy, CEO of Sterling Organization, explains how his firm built a $4 billion vertically integrated shopping center platform by staying committed to retail through 15 years of headwinds—from the financial crisis through the retail apocalypse and COVID-19. He shares his unconventional path from failing out of Canadian schools to practicing real estate law in New York, then launching Sterling Organization in the summer of 2007, just as credit markets froze.

They discuss:

• Why vertical integration creates competitive advantages in tenant relationships and lease structuring that third-party management cannot replicate
• The structural supply-demand imbalance driving a potential seven-year rent growth supercycle in grocery-anchored shopping centers
• How being pigeonholed as "the shopping center guys" during a 15-year downturn created a durable moat as institutional capital returns to the sector
• Why the average shopping center deal size makes it nearly impossible for large allocators to deploy $500 million quickly with quality managers
• The difference between generating alpha in negative beta environments versus riding positive beta waves

This episode examines how conviction through market cycles builds institutional platforms that can't be replicated by trend-followers or capital chasers.