Ask ten people about retail real estate and you will probably get one of two answers: open-air centers are the survivor, or retail as a whole is in decline. Both answers are shortcuts. A property format — an unanchored strip center, a grocery-anchored neighborhood center, a power center, a regional enclosed mall — is a template. It tells you something about how the asset is likely to generate income, how tenants will behave, and where capital costs tend to cluster. It does not tell you whether a specific building on a specific corner will work.
The gap between template and reality is where most underwriting errors begin. Two centers can share a nearly identical tenant mix, size, and vintage and still produce wildly different results, because the difference sits in things a category label cannot capture: the traffic pattern at the intersection, the condition of the roof, the presence of a co-tenancy clause, the way the parking field drains, and how much of the rent roll expires in the same eighteen months.
That is why analysts who work at the property level tend to be suspicious of format-level conclusions. A familiar format is a reasonable place to start a conversation. It is a poor place to end one.
Where the Template Breaks: Property-Level Reality
An underwriting model is less a forecast than a set of arguments, each one testable. The rent roll argues that tenants will renew and pay. The expense assumptions argue that recoveries will offset a predictable share of operating costs. The capital reserve argues that the roof, the lot, and the mechanical systems will age at a manageable pace. When a single location is weak, several of those arguments quietly stop holding at once, and the model rarely announces it. The blended average simply moves, and everyone downstream treats the movement as noise.
This is the level at which experienced practitioners spend their time. The About page for Mark Tersigni describes a career spanning public accounting, corporate finance, and commercial real estate investment, with work centered on how assets are valued, financed, and positioned for sale, including underwriting and managing multibillion-dollar portfolios across large-format open-air retail and enclosed malls. That kind of scope tends to sharpen a specific instinct: the aggregate view is only as honest as the weakest property inside it.
Two Formats, Two Different Failure Modes
Open-air centers and enclosed malls do not weaken in the same way, which is worth holding onto when a portfolio happens to contain both. An open-air center’s risk usually shows up in granular form: a dark junior anchor, a lease expiration cluster among small shop tenants, common-area costs that creep faster than rents, or a parking field that no longer matches how customers actually shop. An enclosed mall’s risk is more structural, concentrated in anchor-lease provisions, co-tenancy triggers, and capital obligations that arrive in large, unpleasant increments.
A September 2026 IBTimes article bylined Tom Robbins, titled Mark Tersigni Outlines the Investment Case for Open-Air Retail Centers, works through that contrast as a published argument: grocery and everyday-need tenants versus department-store-dependent malls, the handling of parking and common-area costs, occupancy levels versus the timing of lease expirations, expense-sharing structures, capital needs, and anchor-lease provisions. It also cautions against broad “retail is dying” narratives, which flatten exactly the distinctions that matter at the property level.
The practical takeaway is not that one format wins. It is that the failure modes differ, so the diligence questions differ. Applying mall logic to a grocery-anchored center, or strip-center logic to a mall, produces confident answers to the wrong questions. A useful exercise is to write down, for each asset, the three assumptions that would hurt most if they proved wrong, and then check whether those three are actually being tested anywhere in the model.
Portfolio Math: How One Weak Asset Distorts the Story
Aggregation is useful and dangerous in equal measure. A portfolio-level model that consolidates individual property plans into a single corporate view is essential for forecasting returns, testing refinancing scenarios, and having a coherent conversation with ownership. But consolidation also averages away distress. A handful of strong assets can mask a laggard for years, right up until that laggard’s lease rollover or deferred capital need arrives and pulls the entire forecast off course.
Anyone who has built one of those roll-ups tends to become particular about the inputs feeding it. The Complete Property Advisors site, where Mark Tersigni is listed as founder, describes consulting and hourly analyst services for commercial real estate owners and investors, including cash flow underwriting, hold/sell/refinance analysis, due diligence support, Excel model creation and maintenance, business planning, and employee training. Much of that work is the unglamorous task of finding the one location whose assumptions do not survive contact with reality.
Public profiles are a reasonable starting point for understanding who performs that kind of review. Beyond the sites above, an additional profile link for Mark Tersigni is available on Crunchbase as a supplementary reference point.
Financing Discipline and the Case for Granular Review
Debt amplifies the weakness of a single location. When a loan is secured by dozens of properties, the lender’s view of collateral value is built from property-level analysis, and the borrower’s refinancing options depend on whether the weak asset drags the pool below a coverage or valuation threshold. A maturity wall is rarely a portfolio problem in the abstract; it is a handful of individual properties with individual problems arriving at inconvenient times.
That is why mortgage-level oversight belongs in the same conversation as acquisition underwriting. Loan covenants, extension tests, and refinancing decisions are all downstream of the rent roll at a specific address. A center that underperforms by a modest margin can consume an outsized share of management attention and, in the wrong capital structure, an outsized share of the outcome. The same holds for disposition timing: a property sold to solve a portfolio-level problem often prices like a property sold to solve a property-level one.
For owners weighing a hold, a sale, or a refinancing, the questions worth answering first are unglamorous. Which location is contributing the least relative to the capital it consumes? Which lease expirations are clustered rather than spread? What would have to be true for the weak asset to perform, and how much would it cost to find out? Readers who want to raise those questions directly can find contact information on the Mark Tersigni contact page, which lists Columbus, Ohio and is intended for inquiries about commercial real estate, underwriting, asset management, finance, and investment strategy.
