I have been going to ICSC Las Vegas for more than ten years. Every year the event gets bigger, the badge lines get longer, and the talking points get shinier. And every year, the same dynamic plays out on that show floor: the people closing deals are the ones who walked in already knowing something.

Not knowing of someone. Knowing something real about them. What markets they are actually targeting. What their real site criteria look like beneath the standard spec sheet. Whether their expansion program has board-level momentum behind it or is still waiting on capital approval. What their last few site decisions revealed about where they are heading next. That kind of intelligence does not come from a conference agenda or a contact list. It comes from years of being in the market, building relationships, and doing the kind of research that puts you inside how your counterpart actually thinks.

That is what separates the dealmakers from the attendees at ICSC Las Vegas. And in 2026, with retail expansion moving in a distinctly more disciplined direction, that gap matters more than ever.

Retailers Are Expanding. They Are Just Being Precise About Where.

The appetite for growth is real. Ross Stores is adding 110 locations this year. Cava is targeting over 70 new restaurants. Target has committed $5 billion toward new stores, remodels, and infrastructure. Grocery operators across every format — conventional, specialty, discount — are actively hunting locations. The budgets exist.

What has changed is the standard a site has to meet before it gets approved. The shift happened because too many retailers learned the hard way that an underperforming store is a multi-year problem that compounds across the portfolio. Build-out costs are up. Rents in prime corridors have kept climbing. A location that opens below its sales forecast does not just miss a number — it becomes a distraction from every store that is actually working. Private equity backed retailers and their boards are now requiring independent market validation before a site moves forward. The broker's enthusiasm is no longer enough.

The categories with the most active expansion programs heading into Las Vegas are grocery, discount and off-price, food and beverage, and health and wellness. Discount grocery formats like Aldi, Lidl, and HEB's Joe V's are moving aggressively, driven by two years of consumers trading down across spending categories. Fast casual restaurant visits were up 8% year over year through the first eight months of 2025. Health and wellness formats are drawing landlord attention not just as tenants but as traffic drivers for the businesses around them. These are not trends worth monitoring. They are active site searches that will produce signed leases before this summer.

What Insiders Know That Everyone Else Does Not

Here is the part that does not get written about enough. Most of the meetings at ICSC Las Vegas are scheduled in advance. The people sitting across from you on that show floor already have a sense of what they want from the conversation before it starts. If you are a landlord or a developer meeting with a grocer, they already have internal sales forecast assumptions for your market. They know whether your trade area pencils for their format or does not. They know what your competitive set looks like and whether their concept has room to perform. They walked into that meeting knowing more about your property than you might expect.

The landlords and developers who win in that room are the ones who walk in knowing the same things from the other direction. What does this grocer's recent site selection pattern actually reveal about their target customer profile? What trade areas have they entered in the last 18 months, and what do those decisions tell you about where they are going next? What do their top-performing stores have in common that their struggling ones do not? That is the kind of analysis that turns a scheduled meeting into a signed LOI. It reframes the conversation from "here is my vacancy" to "here is why this site performs for your specific model, and here is the data to back it up."

I have seen this play out hundreds of times. The landlord who can quote a retailer's own trade area logic back to them, grounded in real market data, is operating at a different level than the one who brought a floor plan and a coffee.

The same principle applies to municipalities. The cities that win retail investment at ICSC are not the ones with the most aggressive incentive packages. They are the ones whose economic development teams arrive knowing which retailers are actively looking in markets that match their demographic and infrastructure profile — and who can demonstrate that readiness with a retail leakage study, a properly defined trade area, and category-specific demand data. That is insider information too. It just takes a different kind of homework to get there.

How Deals Are Getting Structured in 2026

One more shift worth understanding before Las Vegas. The terms of deals are changing. Fixed rent, standard tenant improvement packages, and long initial terms are giving way to more collaborative structures. Landlords with priority vacancies are increasingly offering rent support during the ramp period, performance-based TI contributions, and shorter initial terms with renewal options that give emerging concepts room to prove themselves before committing long-term.

This is not weakness on the landlord side. It reflects a practical recognition that aligning deal structure with a retailer's actual performance trajectory produces better outcomes for both parties over time. And it creates an opening for landlords who arrive at ICSC with a genuine proposal built around what a specific retailer actually needs, rather than terms pulled from last year's standard form.

The retailers showing up in Las Vegas this May are working from validated target lists. They know which markets they want to be in and which sites they are considering. The question is not whether they will make decisions at ICSC. They will. The question is whether you have done the work to be the obvious choice when they do.

Kevin Bissell is Senior Vice President of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, where he leads market intelligence, grocery sales forecasting, and site validation for retailers, landlords, and municipalities across the country. CRE360 helps clients arrive at ICSC Las Vegas prepared to have the conversations that close. Schedule a consultation before the show.