Retail real estate veteran Michael Puline has joined Marcus & Millichap and its Institutional Property Advisors division to steer the strategic expansion of the firm’s retail platform. In his new role, he is tasked with guiding retail investment sales professionals and sharpening client service across both organizations. Puline arrives with a 25-year track record that includes more than 2,500 leasing and sale transactions totaling $8.5 billion in volume.
Puline describes his move from the principal side into brokerage as driven by a belief that retail investment advisory is entering a new phase where human insight and advanced technology must work together. After years overseeing a national portfolio at DLC and nearly a decade leading retailer strategy within a Blackstone-owned platform, he sees value in applying an owner’s lens to brokerage. That perspective, he notes, means focusing not only on the real estate, but also on the capital stack, operational constraints, and long-range business plans behind each asset.
He says his objective at Marcus & Millichap and IPA is to help clients think through complex operational, capital, and strategic decisions using lessons learned from being on the ownership side. Puline argues that the brokerage of the future must go beyond execution and align more tightly with how principals underwrite risk, structure capital, and time their moves in the cycle.
Puline points to the scale of Marcus & Millichap’s and IPA’s data and research platform as a key draw, emphasizing the advantage of proprietary information in a retail market where speed and intelligence are critical. He highlights the combination of an experienced management team and entrepreneurial advisors with deep street-level knowledge, and says his focus is on arming that talent with more specialized retail expertise and technology while maintaining a principal’s mindset.
On the market, Puline notes that capital spent much of the last 15 years rotating from retail into industrial to capture e-commerce growth, based on the assumption that physical retail demand would fade. Instead, he observes steady, broad-based demand for retail space, from traditional chains and quick-service restaurants to service concepts that need proximity to where consumers live. He adds that last-mile retail footprints have benefited not only grocers and superstores but also digital delivery platforms, driving strong investment interest from private investors, institutions, and retailers themselves.
Within the sector, he cites grocery and net-lease assets as continuing safe havens, but says shop space is now a major driver of rental income growth. Small-shop demand has led the cycle, creating outsized appetite for unanchored strip centers, which he characterizes as among the better-performing formats. Puline also sees the bid-ask gap closing fastest on higher-quality retail across formats as investors reward strong fundamentals.
With vacancies at historic lows in many markets and limited new supply, he reports that retailers are more willing to pay higher rents supported by stronger sales and low chain-wide occupancy costs. National tenants, he says, are also rethinking footprint and format, with some large-format users downsizing to 15,000–20,000 square feet and others expanding their typical size to secure prime locations. At the lease-structure level, he is seeing more flexibility around exclusives and co-tenancy provisions as tenants prioritize speed to market, a shift he believes tilts long-term value back toward ownership.
Looking ahead, Puline wants the team to be recognized within a year as the market’s leading retail specialists, providing not only investment sales advice but also granular insight into shifting categories and company strategies. He contends that the most underappreciated trend is how powerful the combination of human expertise and scalable technology will be for retail brokerage. In his view, few firms are successfully integrating their people with their tech stack, while Marcus & Millichap and IPA are investing in proprietary tools designed to enhance, rather than replace, advisor judgment and research capabilities.
