Jodie McLean is the CEO of EDENS, one of the largest and most influential private retail real estate owners and developers in the U.S., with a $6.6 billion portfolio spanning over 100 open-air centers.
A 30-year industry veteran and pioneer of community-focused development, McLean has redefined retail not as a commodity transaction but as a human experience. At the helm of EDENS, she’s driven a bold thesis: combat isolation by designing emotionally resonant, walkable centers that serve as the modern public square.
In this conversation, McLean shares how she’s positioning retail as a critical social infrastructure, discusses the data behind dwell time and emotional attachment, and explores how human connection—not just tech innovation—will define the future of the built environment. We also explore EDENS' approach to leasing, design, KPIs, and how retail can be both high-performing and deeply human.
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The Thesis Driven Leader Series is made possible with the support of Neutral.
Neutral is redefining multifamily real estate with a focus on sustainability, resident health and well-being. For example, Neutral is building the tallest mass timber and Passive House residential building in the U.S with a state-of-art wellness club in Milwaukee. Beyond environmental impact, Neutral offers investors access to substantial sustainable tax credits and deductions. Accredited investors can explore available opportunities at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more.
The following transcript is automatically generated. Please forgive us for any errors or misspellings.
Brad Hargreaves: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader series. I'm Brad Hargreaves, founder and editor-in-chief of Thesis Driven, and your host for today. Today we're joined by Jodie McLean, the CEO of EDENS. You may not have heard of EDENS, but they're a leading player in the retail sector with over a hundred large scale, open air shopping centers, places like Union Market, in Washington DC, and Lula Hills in Atlanta. Not just strip centers, these are real large scale anchors for the neighborhoods in which they exist.
Today's conversation is going to touch on a lot of topics. We don't go deep into retail very often here at Thesis Driven, but consumer preference, changes in behavior, and the macro side of user behavior, as it intersects with real estate in the built world is incredibly important to us. Regular Thesis Driven readers know the loneliness epidemic is something I write a lot about. It's drove my last company, Common. It's very close to my heart, so [00:01:00] we're gonna approach retail not just from the dollars and cents in development point of view, but from the perspective of what drives consumer behavior, and can something like EDENS, where you're building walkable spaces that people are using as gathering hubs, can they help address the loneliness epidemic?
We'll talk about the role of those physical places, the kind that EDENS builds and operates in fostering connection. Now we're also gonna talk about the role of data and technology in building great retail businesses. A lot has changed in the retail world from a data standpoint, from a technology standpoint over the last three, five years. So we're gonna hit on all that. There are a lot more data sources out there from credit card data to foot traffic, to cell phone use, and we'll discuss how things like that factor into EDENS business and how Jodie is navigating some of the challenges that come with new data innovation, and once again, changes in consumer behavior.
Before we welcome [00:02:00] Jodie to the show, I do wanna thank our sponsor Neutral which has really made this entire season happen. They're a sustainable developer based in the Midwest. They've done projects in Madison, in Milwaukee. They're building actually the tallest mass timber building in the United States and for them, sustainable development, it isn't just good for the planet, it's financially beneficial, and they build with mass timber and meet the industry's most rigorous certifications like passive house, living building, challenge lead, and energy star. And by doing that, they're able to leverage sustainability tax benefits like 48, section 45L, 179D is a bunch of them, and they pass a lot of those savings onto investors. Sometimes up to 60% of investment value comes from deductions from those tax benefits alone. You can learn more about them at invest.neutral.u s or reach out to them at invest@netural.u s. So very thankful to Neutral for making this happen.
So with that said, let's welcome Jodie [00:03:00] McLean to the show.
Jodie, welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader Series. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Jodie McLean: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Brad Hargreaves: A bunch of things I wanna talk about today, but one thing I really am excited to dig into is your philosophy around solving the loneliness epidemic and fostering social and emotional connection in your spaces.
It may not seem obvious for a retail investor that this is something they do, but it certainly is close to our hearts and that the loneliness epidemic is something we talk about a lot. We'd love to understand, have your thinking about that and maybe talk a little bit about what you're doing through the context of fostering those social and emotional connections?
Jodie McLean: I often say. The singular problem that EDENS is trying to solve is this problem of isolation, loneliness, and depression. What has happened and what is the role of retail, particular the type of retail we're involved with, which is all open-air and very [00:04:00] community-driven. What is our real purpose? How do we distinguish ourselves?
We started this in 2006, where broadband really expanded into 50% of households in the US. It was a really good intersection for me personally. I had a career that was flying high, fast-paced. Things were pretty good in retail, and I was out seeing retail everywhere. This also coincided with a time where 72% of all mothers were working outside the household. I realized how they were becoming more disconnected from their local communities.
Women use these words. "I feel lonely. I feel a little isolated. I'm not connected. I don't feel connected." But in the same time, broadband, we all had this whole new connection and whole new connections that were happening. At that [00:05:00] point, a company did a really deep dive into trying to ultimately understand what role were we gonna play? Were we going to double down on technology? And I will say from right from the beginning, Brad, I am a believer in e-commerce. And I think it is our partner and our friend, not our foe, and we work together. We could double down there and try to digitalize all of our assets or we could double down on humanity, and really think about this physical asset that we owned and what would its deeper purpose be.
As we started down that, what I would say rabbit hole, is where we found true purpose for our organization. Not only did we learn more about our community members and our ultimate customers, but we also learned a lot about the emotional connections that really drive decisions to buy. It drives [00:06:00] every decision we make: drives three and a half trips per week, five hours of dwell time at our places, which are astronomical numbers when you think about your own life. For every 1% of additional time that people spend at our places, we get about 1.3% of additional wallet share.
At the end of the day, we are solving to a problem of humanity and what is best for humans, but it turns out to be a really good business decision as well.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. Clearly, the dwell time that connectivity drives wallet share. How do you drive the dwell time and connectivity? How is that the design leasing, what goes into that mix?
Jodie McLean: Everything. Every decision we make goes into that mix. We think about, first and foremost, location. We are very much hard-asset-driven. Location matters, convenience matters. Then we think about design. We think about how people enter our places, [00:07:00] how convenient it is for them to park their car.
Women still drive 80% of all retail decisions, little secret. They prefer to make a right-hand turns than left hand turns. Then we think about the layout, landscaping, how you feel from the minute you're sitting, from the minute you leave our place.
We're thinking about emotionally, because it's an emotional decision. A lot of times when people come to a need's place, they might drive by one or two other places where they could go get a gallon of milk, but why do they decide to drive by? It's because of this emotional attachment they have to our places, how they feel there.
Do they feel safe? That's obvious, but do they feel warm? We use a lot of wood at our places. The landscaping, all of those add in to how much time. We call it jewelry on our sidewalks and in our places so that if you and I bumped into each other, there's a comfortable place for us to [00:08:00] sit and to catch up quickly over a cup of coffee.
Art is an easy way to spark conversation with a stranger and we talk a lot about consequential strangers. What does that mean, that our places are full of consequential strangers? If we can cause a conversation to happen between two people, it might be just something simple, it might just be, "wow, isn't that a beautiful mural?" And somebody responds to you. The next thing you know you have something in common and you can take the conversation a little further.
Those are all emotional connections, and when people make emotional connections, they feel physically safe, emotionally safe. It's subconscious, they decide to come back over and over again.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. From a design standpoint, there's a lot going on.
I want to talk about it from a leasing angle too. Talking to real estate owners, developers we interview for our show is always this, debate between, do you [00:09:00] go after the perfect tenant who is going to create this amazing environment or do you go after the bank that has the best credit? How do you think about balance that when you are, thinking about the tenant mix in a space?
Jodie McLean: We think about it starting again at trips and dwell time. We lay out a site plan and about 90%+ of our places have a grocery anchor. The grocer drives between 1.9 and 2.7 trips per week, that grocer is important though, and they drive the trips. We need to understand our community. What are the values of our community and what are they looking for?
We think about national versus local. Creditworthiness is a big part of how we think about things, but if there's great local proprietors, we call them the "mayors" of our center. The proprietors, day in and day out, their personality, know every customer that walks in their door. They know their children, they know their names. They know what they [00:10:00] bought the last time they were there. That proprietor could be a cupcake maker, an apparel store, a record store. Those people are important because that's where a lot of emotional attachment happens.
We've done and continue to do a lot of exit interviews at our places. And when people tell you, you'll say why do you feel so loyal to center X, Y, Z? A lot of times what you'll hear them say is the local retailers who are there. Okay, great. So it's Brad's Coffee Spot, whatever, and then you say "why were you here today?" " Oh I was here today at the grocery store. I was here today at the Starbucks." What a national retailer.
And it's okay. But you said that your attachment's so local. Absolutely. So how often do you actually go in the local store? Sometimes it's every week, but sometimes it's every three weeks. It's just interesting, but those are where the emotional attachments are made. So those are really [00:11:00] important pieces to our puzzle.
We think about her daily trips, where she can make connections, and all the reasons she wants to come to our places. So in a perfect world, our places are hyperlocal, so she can be in and out quick to run a daily errand, whether that's grabbing a gallon of milk, picking up dry cleaning, and that's very convenient.
She may decide to come back on date night with her husband, with her boyfriend, meet somebody, and that place has to feel great. It can't feel like you're sitting in a big parking lot. It has to feel great. It has to make, you have to be able to make memories there. And then she may come back with her kids, a whole different trip.
Or she might not come back at all, but she's sending the people she loves, whether it's a husband, a boyfriend, a spouse, a brother, a father. For another kind of trip. We think about that with curation. [00:12:00] We call it curation in our places.
We think about curating our places and how we maximize the efficiency of our parking. How do we use our places for probably 18 hours a day?
Brad Hargreaves: You have to think about programming the retail, the timing of when peoples are going to show up, okay, here, the grocery store peak in the mornings and after work. You've got your lunch spot to balance out that parking.
Jodie McLean: Absolutely. And the other thing we think about our curation and our public space as well. That's become more and more important. Two years ago, we had data that said, we drove over a million trips to our places that were generated first and foremost by somebody coming to the public space. So their purpose of coming was to a green space, a hardscape mural, an activity or to spend time in public space. It was significant time and then they did a retail chore, so we think about part of [00:13:00] that curation now as much more than just who our retail partners are.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that, but EDENS has substantial scale. If I recall correctly, a hundred shopping centers, how do you bake that notion, the way you think about it into the culture, so those decisions, that are getting made by a leasing manager on the ground, reflect that philosophy of how you wanna program the space?
Jodie McLean: It's a great question. I'm gonna come back to a straight answer, but here's what I will tell you that I know factually is correct. We use Gallup to help us do all of our engagement surveys internally and we have four KPIs that we really measure internally at the company.
The first is employee engagement. Our employees engage somewhere between 93% and 95% in our purpose and mission to enrich community. We talk about community at all levels, we give examples, we tell stories, we celebrate [00:14:00] our stories of community.
The second KPI is our retail partners productivity. Where sales are happening, whether they're in our four walls or they're in the marketplace online. We celebrate both because a physical store that people are feeling connected to, and they will drive online sales for our retail partners.
The third is total shareholder return. We are privately held. I think it is an honor and a privilege and win back our capital partners, so to speak.
Our fourth is our community impact stats, and we talk about these and we celebrate these. Because it goes back to that is really where our people are most engaged. Everybody loves earning a paycheck, they love being compensated, but it's not really what they're most passionate. They are most passionate about community. Because our people are, I think it shows up at our places and it shows up in our [00:15:00] places how they're designed, shows up in our places, how they're curated, shows up in our places in the engagement. Because our places feel good. Which is like a weird word to be using in a highly capitalistic business. We drive exceptional trips and dwell time, and that is what makes our retail partners so successful, and because they are successful, we can drive rents, we can drive revenues that drives total shareholder return. Then it comes back to our community stats.
It's an endless loop and very circular. I don't know which KPIs is most important. I think our employee engagement, but that happens because of the community engagement. It all works together for us, but I do think it is this celebration of the stories of what happens at our places, and with our retail [00:16:00] partners that also all pretty much subscribe to community. And that is where our people, they're excited, they're proud, they're happy to be a part of something that has a little bit more depth and meaning to it than just dollars and cents.
Brad Hargreaves: So one last question kind of clarification on this community point. How do you perceive the relationship between the scale of a given center, and the ability of that place to foster community connections, a place people wanna be?
Obviously you can think of massive centers that have tremendous dwell times. There are some here in the New York metro area— huge indoor complexes, but they're not necessarily community hubs in any way, shape, or form, but obviously you need some scale to generate those returns and to make the business make sense.
How do you think about that relationship between center, scale, and the ability to be a place people wanna be in foster community?
Jodie McLean: All places that [00:17:00] we own can foster community, period. That is a given. I think though that you need a little bit of scale and not all of our places have the same scale.
Brad Hargreaves: What's the rough like range there, if you don't mind me asking?
Jodie McLean: So our scale would be from 100,000 feet up to 600,000 our largest. There is a real differential of scale there, but we think about things like widths of sidewalks. So even in a smaller asset, we can design to have wider sidewalks. Because on wider sidewalks, people can easily walk side by side. It's very subtle.
The lighting can be different, an outdoor cafe that signals to people slow down, connect, even if it's a quick trip to a coffee shop where you can sit and linger just slightly longer in seats and chairs .
We like to have wider sidewalks where we can [00:18:00] have benches, where we can have places for people to sit, where we can have beautiful planters that give people this signal that they're a part of something a little bit larger than themselves.
Brad Hargreaves: Hearing you talk about the design of these centers, it reminds me a lot of the principles of New Urbanism and how people think about urban design and the way cities should be designed.
Now, a lot of your centers are in suburban areas that are fairly car-centric, and people are driving to these centers. How do you think about that? Do you see these as like oasis of walkability in a suburban center? And/or do you wish cities would get a little more flexible with how they were designed toward more walkability overall?
Jodie McLean: I would lean towards more walkability. Our centers Charlotte, Dallas, Atlanta that I can go on are near trails, they all prosper. People do appreciate, but for the most part, [00:19:00] with very few exceptions, our places still people are coming primarily by vehicular traffic.
Sometimes mass transit, but for the most part it's vehicular. And so we think about this. This is both a great opportunity for convenience, 'cause convenience is still really important. When our kids were at home, some of my most favorite trips to one of our centers would be where I could zip in, grab a gallon of milk and get out in five minutes because I was running late. I had said I would bring something, bring it home after work, and God bless this place for letting me be able to get in and out so fast.
At that same center, I wanna come back on Friday night, and enjoy a great meal outdoors, and I don't wanna feel like I'm sitting in a large parking lot. It's a design challenge for us. It's a design opportunity. How do we create this little oasis?
I like to [00:20:00] think of our role is to be either the kitchen or the living room of a community. We used to say the living room, but most people hang out in the kitchen whenever you have a party, right? But wherever that heart at the home is that's the role our centers need to play. They need to be the heart of the community.
Yes, parking is important, but if we can connect to the surrounding neighborhoods, if we can make walking paths, bike paths, golf cart paths, depending on the neighborhoods, and make it feel really safe.
The greatest thing is when you see an 8 and a 10-year-old riding over on their bikes, that means somebody at home feels like this is a really safe place. The kids feel really comfortable. That means we're doing something really right.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. Yeah. It's one of those interesting contrasts with the way American cities are built today is, you obviously need a lot of space to do what you're doing. That space comes in places that are somewhat car-centric, which [00:21:00] is, not a contrast, but it's certainly a design challenge, as you said, when you're looking to build walkability and that safety.
Jodie McLean: And how do we landscape the parking lots, but yet give clear visibility to our retailers? These are things that we sit around and we ponder but we're figuring it out.
Brad Hargreaves: So I'm gonna shift for a moment to the question of technology and innovation. And when I was reading some of your writings for to prep for this I noticed you wrote about the contrast between good innovation and bad innovation.
I'm curious of what you meant by that and, gen AI for instance, where does that sit on the spectrum of good and bad innovation?
Jodie McLean: I love technology, especially when it works. I actually think that we should be using technology as a tool to make us more efficient.
This is what I've tried to say in our organization. Let's use technology to make us more efficient, but let's not fill our extra time with just more busy work, let's actually fill [00:22:00] our extra time to be more creative, to be more innovative, to be more thoughtful, to hit excellence. It's a little bit like retail, right?
Those things that are true commodity, we should access them very efficiently and we should, in my mind, let's use AI for those things, or let's use technology for those things. But those things that really make us understand how to drive a better place, ultimately, how to drive better relationships, better communication, better creativity.
Those are places that that I wanna keep human engagement a part of. People are always telling me, and have been telling me this for the last almost 20 years. A day where I wake up, I roll into my office next door to my bedroom, just down the hall, I load up and I'm looking at all my teammates on [00:23:00] Zoom. I order Uber Eats for lunch. I wrap up, I order DoorDash for dinner. I watch Netflix, and I go to bed is not a day where I feel really inspired.
It's not to say that a Zoom call or a Netflix show or may individually make me feel inspired, but where I feel alive is when I've had a shared experience with another human being. I feel alive when I sit in an office and I sit across the desk and I have harmonious discord with somebody I live, I work with, and we wind up at a better decision for having that discussion. We walk out, I'm inspired, I can't wait to go execute, or we're sitting around and we have a design challenge and we're sitting in a room and somebody grabs markers and starts drawing up on a plan. You can just feel the energy and the connection.
So I think that's the role I wanna play in [00:24:00] community. I wanna be this place where people go: I just wanna connect with human beings. I think I'm gonna go down the street to Trenton Plaza because I know I'm gonna bump into somebody I know at Publix.
Brad Hargreaves: Absolutely. But since the pandemic, that feels like that's been fewer and fewer Americans existence.
Jodie McLean: Maybe that's why we have such a wellness issue. Maybe we're not doing our job well enough, but we have 15 million people every single day at EDENS whose lives we can impact at our places and our people know that. And we take that role very seriously. So I, anytime I'm on a property, I watch our people. It is so routine.
They stop. If there's a piece of trash, I watch this all the time, they pick it up, they throw it away, they hold the door for the retail partner. They know there's this engagement because our people know, our communities are depending on us.
The other thing I say a lot: i'm [00:25:00] not competing with Amazon. I'm competing with inertia. I'm competing with inspiring people to leave their couches at home and want to come engage at our places.
Brad Hargreaves: There's a study that came out a month ago. Harvard study looked at the uses of AI and when you ask people how they're using AI consumers, how are they using it? If you go back two years ago, how they were using AI, it was very much probably how I use AI, which is, I have a replacement for search. It's about, querying things. It's about automating simple things in my life. That was two years ago. Evidently, I'm two years behind. If you are asking people today how they use AI, companionship was number one.
Jodie McLean: Yeah.
Brad Hargreaves: Are we fighting an uphill fight? Are the robots too good?
Jodie McLean: I'm not giving up. Maybe. Maybe we are, but I just think that means we have to do. I really am saying this a lot right now at EDENS. We have to do our ordinary [00:26:00] work extraordinarily well. We have to do it number one because that's absolutely the first line of defense anytime you're in a little bit of economic lack of predictability, let me just say that, but also I think we have to inspire people. I spend at least one day a year at a sporting event where there's no phones allowed and you're outside. And I always say to the people...
Brad Hargreaves: Do you mind me asking what this is?
Jodie McLean: It's a golf tournament.
Brad Hargreaves: Okay, it's golf tournament.
Jodie McLean: And I always say to the people that I'm taking with me, I always say the same thing. You can't even take your phone in. You have to leave it in the car and you just watch people they physically like, oh my God.
And I'm like, you're gonna be okay. And I'm also gonna tell you this. When we come out, you are gonna tell me this was one of the best days you've ever had, and I promise you it is not because I'm so charming and wonderful to be with and without [00:27:00] fail, the same thing happens every single year with every person.
I've never had one person say, I am so riddled with anxiety being away from my phone. Never. People say the same thing. They're like, that was one of the best days I've ever had. Because you have no choice but to be engaged with other human beings the entire day. You're out in nature and it is how we are physiologically designed. We have chemicals in our body that only are ignited when we have connections with other human beings. And so I just think that I am a fan, I do not have my head in the sand, i'm a fan of technology. We use technology. We use it. We believe in it, but I don't think the computers can ever replace the true connection that you have with another human being. That emotional connection and what [00:28:00] happens to us as people. We are just designed that way.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. I do wanna spend time on hopefully a less terrifying aspect of technology, which is there's a lot of great data out there that didn't necessarily exist 20 years ago in the retail world. You think about what some companies like Placer are doing, for instance, around foot traffic data, cell phone data, all sorts of things.
What's your take on that? How are y'all using it?
Jodie McLean: I think it is fantastic. We are using it to watch trends. Because you can take this data and I can slice it a million different ways and I know the sales volumes, for the most part, that are happening at our places. So we can say, oh, they're missing a lot of people, or they're not missing people, or this or that. But if you can watch trends. It is incredibly helpful to be able to watch trends of where people are spending time.
I would've never known this seven years ago, that we crossed this milestone of a million [00:29:00] people coming, first and foremost, because of what was happening in our common areas. That's a huge number. That mean that is empowering me then to shift my resources. Does that mean I should push some of the things we're doing in common areas? Where to invest, where to not invest. It helps me understand. There is a limit to what we invest in our common area where it no longer drives foot traffic.
It's an overinvestment. It's an over design. To understand foot traffic, heat maps where people, where do we have a retail partner that is exceptionally, not just their sales volume, but you could see it by people spending time there. And there's so much to learn.
We're watching it with traffic, but then I'm also watching it with, how are we doing in the marketplace? I don't wanna, sometimes it's easy to sell your own book to yourself. And literally earlier today, for one of our assets, I had an analyst take [00:30:00] 10 other places in the marketplace and say, we're patting ourselves on the back, that we're doing a great job.
Wait, how does this look stacked up to everybody else in the marketplace? So we are using this data we're also using it to think about, Hey, where are people attracted? If it's not here, where is it and why? So we're using Placer for all, every day, part of our acquisition strategy, part of our disposition strategy. It's incredibly important tool, but mostly I would say it helps us understand trends very quickly.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. One last, question is, I do talk to a lot of real estate investors and think about, it's mostly who I have on the show, people in the real estate world, talk about where they're interested in and where capital is flowing.
One of the hottest sectors right now is a part of retail, which is the triple net standalone retail box leased to Dutch Brothers for a drive through on some strode [00:31:00] outside Dallas. So there's a lot of capital going after that right now. A lot of people wanna be in that kind of triple net standalone retail space.
Obviously it's different than what EDENS does, but plays into some sort of similar trends. So is that something you've thought of getting into, is there a world where you go do triple net retail boxes?
Jodie McLean: Probably not. Probably not. Right now as a thesis, we have different thesis that we are following and triple net for us is not. I understand there's a lot that is flowing there. Mostly, unless they are shorter term leases, where we can really drive significant value in a short amount of time.
I think our real value add is number one our operational. We are exceptional operators. I would just say, and I think our track record has proven that out. And then our ability to reposition assets are the two places and usually with a [00:32:00] triple net single long term lease.
There's not as much work for us to do. As soon as I say that I'm gonna turn around and buy a piece of property and it'll have a very strategic reason, but we just have a different thesis in that though.
I love to see people pursuing that. And it says, it very much backs up that retail brick and mortar retail it really is thriving right now for all sorts of different reasons.
Brad Hargreaves: It really is and it's remarkable because you look at some analyses and it's you know us compared to other countries, the US is overreached.
Yes. But then. By God, there's demand for it.
Jodie McLean: We are great consumers. I used to have this whole way before the pandemic, probably 10 years ago. I, we came up with the thesis that yes, we were over retailed and we went through exactly why and how much square, almost a billion square feet over retail, or 2 billion in this country.
But what happened is really [00:33:00] since '08, we've had almost all no new net new growth at all in our sector. And so there has been some population growth over that time. But we're also really good consumers here in the us. So we are starting. I don't think you're gonna see huge amount of net new growth in our sector yet for some time.
It's just, there's too much. There's still a disconnect from cost and being able to drive rents, but it is one of the best parts about this sector right now is there continues to be, even in times, like right now, high demand for any vacancy.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. What is continuing to drive it and drive capital flows there too.
Jodie McLean: Yes.
Brad Hargreaves: So what we do with every guest, quick lightning round questions. Quick questions, quick answers ready to jump in. Sure. Alright, so first question. Tell us about one startup, developer or entrepreneur you're watching and why.
Jodie McLean: I have a very young [00:34:00] entrepreneur in Washington, DC by the name of Ron David. He has two apparel stores now. He's getting ready to open a cafe, and I think when a consumer walks in his door, he knows how to make them feel seen. I've sat in his store and I watched him convert. His charisma, his understanding of the consumer. I think that he will grow very quickly.
Brad Hargreaves: Love that. When you and I are recording this podcast in the 2030s, say five years out, what's the most important real estate tech topic we're gonna be talking about and why?
Jodie McLean: Two things. I think we're gonna be talking about location. I think everybody thinks location is gonna go away. I still think location, and I think we're going to talk about humanity and we're gonna talk about it in office, multifamily and retail especially. But we're gonna find out that people's connection to humanity continues to [00:35:00] drive our business more so than we realize.
Brad Hargreaves: Love it. What's one city or place you would bet on?
Jodie McLean: I would bet on Washington DC for a long run. I would bet on Washington DC for the long run.
Brad Hargreaves: Deeply contrarian. It's great.
Jodie McLean: Yes.
Brad Hargreaves: What we want here. What's your favorite app on your home screen?
Jodie McLean: FaceTime, I don't know that's an app.
Brad Hargreaves: It's an app, count.
Jodie McLean: FaceTime, without question. I catch my people, I catch a lot of people off guard all the time. I like to use FaceTime a lot and people always send me a text was this a mistake? I'm like, no. Nope. I love to see the eyes, so I would probably say FaceTime.
Brad Hargreaves: I love it. I think it's the first time anyone's answered FaceTime, but it's an app and I get it. I love it. Jodie, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was a great conversation.
Jodie McLean: Thank you for having me.
Brad Hargreaves: Appreciate you all tuning in today, and tuning in to season two of the Thesis Driven Leader series. That's a wrap on season two. That's our final episode of this season.
We are so thankful to our dedicated listeners to all of you for tuning in [00:36:00] every week to listen to the conversations with the leaders that we have brought on this season.
And we also do wanna give, once again, a special thanks to Neutral whose financial support made this season possible.
If you enjoyed these conversations and you're not subscribed to Thesis Driven, definitely do that. Go to Thesis Driven.com to join our list, and you will be the first to know when season three is on the docket.
In the meantime, we'll continue to put out two deep dives a week into topics on the future of real estate. Don't be a stranger and see you all soon enough.
This is Brad Hargreaves signing out for season two.
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