I think there's a lot of people that can build great real estate, great developments, but how you service your guests, and we break it down into two areas. We break down, you have the guest experience, and you have your customer experience. My customer is Nordstrom, Tiffany, Lulu, Lemon, whatever. That's my customer. Their customer is my guest. We have to have a great customer experience. They're paying the bills. We have to make sure we have a platform that allows them to be profitable, and that allows them to engage their guest on brand. The guest experience is a very different experience. How you greet it, how you come into the parking, how what you see, what you touch, what you feel we talked about, the trees, the flowers, the programming, the music, all of those things. If you're having a problem, how you're helped, having a concierge, nobody in the retail business had done concierge services until we did it at the Grove. Hi, this is Matt Slippen,

and welcome to Leading Voices in Real Estate. Today's episode is part of our series on real estate legends, a conversation with Rick Caruso, the owner and developer of three of the country's most productive shopping centers all in Los Angeles, the best known of which is The Grove. We were meant to do this in person at The Grove, but unfortunately I came home with COVID from my recent East Coast trip, so we had to do this via Zoom. We recorded on October 12, 2023. I am one of the few West Coast real estate people who have not experienced The Grove, so I was looking forward to having my tour of The Grove as orientation for the conversation, but The Cove had got in my way. My visit would also have been the day after Taylor Swift debuted her concert movie, which she chose to premiere at The Grove, so kudos to Rick for being front and center at the epic center of popular culture. While in The Pod, Rick and I talk about his career and the evolution of his development thinking that led to the creation of such a groundbreaking truly genre-shifting part of the built environment in Los Angeles. This was a great leading voices conversation, and prep for listeners coming West to Los Angeles next week for the ULI Fall Meeting. Rick touched on many of the themes we hear on leading voices again and again around the breakthroughs achieved through focus, hard work, and inspiration of what will truly move the needle for customers writ large in our real estate products. This was a broad-ranging conversation, but we only got to scratch the surface on a civic and philanthropic work. His recent run for Mayor of Los Angeles and his thoughts on this moment in time for our troubled West Coast downtowns. This conversation with Rick is another touchpoint on our work at CRG. Rick is good friends with my CRG colleague Michael Castine, and through Michael we have helped Rick build his team over the years. One of the pleasures of working within a global, integrated, and multi-disciplinary firm like CRG is that we have these synergies across our businesses, which deepens our capability for work across the human capital spectrum for our clients. As always, I hope that you are enjoying leading voices and that you will find value and wisdom from this week's episode. If so, please recommend the show and your favorite episodes to your friends and colleagues. If you are catching these randomly, you should subscribe or follow the show on your favorite podcast app so that it will appear in your next up feed. Also, please do invite me as a contact on your LinkedIn so that I know who you are and I can keep in touch on new episodes. And if you have a few minutes, please rate the show on Apple Podcast or your preferred podcast app. And as always, if you have comments, questions, or guest suggestions, or want to get in touch about how CRG can help your company grow, expand, or think through your human capital needs, please email me at mslappen at zargpartners.com. I hope that you enjoy the conversation with Rick Caruso. So Rick Caruso, welcome to Leading Voices in Real Estate. I am sorry we're not in person today, but we're on the Zoom, which is almost as good.