Most people spend their holidays taking time off and relaxing. Not James Cook, Americas director of retail research at JLL.
Six years ago, Cook was perfecting and morphing his then-new "Where We Buy" podcast, going to a local mall to produce content for it. Since then he's done more than 200 podcasts for JLL about his passion: retail real estate. At ICSC's New York conference last week, Cook could be seen interviewing guests and recording his podcasts at a little studio set up at JLL's booth.
"I just started it on a whim," Cook told CoStar News during an interview at ICSC, recalling his podcasting experimentation and launch in October 2016. "I recorded into my voice memo in my iPhone, just a couple minutes of me talking. And then I figured out online how to create a podcast, that helped me load it."
Initially, the podcasts were short, with Cook just speaking a few minutes. But he took it to another level a few months later during the Christmas holiday with the on-site retail visit. Now the podcasts include interviews of industry executives and are 30 to 45 minutes long.
"I personally edit some and then I also have producers that I work with," the retail research guru said. "But it is my hobby as well as my work. I do the editing on weekends a lot."
He recorded eight podcasts at last week's ICSC confab. "There are some days I'll do like nine in a day at a conference, so you really have to like it," Cook said. And he does.
"Mine are mostly interviews. ... What I love is it gives me the opportunity to talk to so many people, interesting people, and draw stories out of them and also just learn about all the industry trends," Cook said. "I feel really lucky."
As would be expected from a researcher, Cook — a self-professed fan of true-crime podcasts — has lots of data on the reach of his own podcasts. There have been over 155,000 unique downloads of "Where We Buy," for example. And the top five states for its listeners are California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois.