Miami broker Mark Gilbert spent two dozen years at Cushman & Wakefield before taking the top job at ShopCore Properties, a Blackstone affiliate. But in the end, the lure of being CEO of a large retail owner didn't compare to doing deals in South Florida and beyond.

Gilbert returned to Chicago-based Cushman & Wakefield's Miami office last week after serving eight months as chief executive of ShopCore and running his own shop for six months. In addition to getting back his former title of vice chairman, he has been named leader of Cushman's retail capital markets group in the Americas.

In his new role, Gilbert will endeavor to grow Cushman & Wakefield's retail investment platform and work with partners Adam Feinstein and Mitch Halpern on sales transactions.

Gilbert first joined Cushman & Wakefield in 1997 when he sold Venturvest Realty, the brokerage firm he had founded eight years prior, to Cushman.

"When I arrived in '97, after selling the company to them, I thought I'd be there four or five years. So my initial thought sort of didn't play out," Gilbert said in an interview.

After leaving for ShopCore last year, Gilbert said he realized he had built a strong network inside Cushman & Wakefield as well as outside the firm that would be hard to create somewhere else. So when the opportunity to return emerged, he took it.

"I really felt like I was coming home, and I really felt like it was my best bet for success in the future because I already knew the culture, which I loved, and it was sort of the natural place to continue in my brokerage business," Gilbert said. "What I realized I missed when I left was the camaraderie and the ability to know exactly where to go to get resources and knowledge and expertise. Why should I, in the middle of my career, try and replicate that again?"

During his time at ShopCore, which he left after discovering the job there was not a good fit, Gilbert said he saw firsthand the power of Blackstone's investment portfolio that includes several types of commercial properties and a variety of operating companies. The information shared among Blackstone companies provides the investment giant with "a unique advantage, and this benefits everything that Blackstone does," he said.

"Their ability to cross-pollinate data across all their different platform companies and investments and synthesize them down into trends helps each of their investments become better," Gilbert said. "If you think about ShopCore and retail, Blackstone is invested in all property types. So as industrial space is expanding, they can see the tenants expanding, which can tell them other retailers are expanding. They're invested in retail companies, so they can see retailers expanding."

A third-generation Miamian and MBA grad from the University of Florida, Gilbert got into commercial real estate after working at an accounting firm that now is part of KPMG. He went into business with an accounting firm client and then started his own brokerage after that.

As Gilbert prepares for his trip to Nevada later this month for the ICSC 2022 Las Vegas retail trade show, he said the state of retail is strong outside of Class B and C malls, in part because the coronavirus "made retail more successful."

"It's the first time in my career where I really witnessed a partnership between tenants and owners and how to move through this pandemic and come out stronger," Gilbert said. "It was a true partnership. There was a lot of give and take on both sides. Landlords had to be flexible. Tenants had to be nimble and adjust how they operated their businesses for a long time. Retailers figured out what they tried to do."

On the retail investment side, demand for properties remains strong, although the rising cost of borrowing money to purchase properties could affect that, he said.

"It has become a little bit choppier as a result of interest rate increases, but owners that want to buy good retail are still leaning in, and pricing always finds an equilibrium regardless of where interest rates are," Gilbert said. "So today it's unchanged, but I think the Fed is going to raise interest rates another 50 basis points in the next two meetings. Maybe it will impact it, but maybe not."