Repricing the Big Box Anchor
Inside Brixton Capital: a contrarian big-box strategy built around grocery-anchored real estate, mispriced anchor cap rates, and the survivors of retail's decade-long shakeout.
Interview
Key Takeaways
The market bet against a version of big box that no longer exists.
The weakest national retailers, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pier 1, Sports Authority, washed out between 2015 and 2025. What's left is fiscally disciplined and stronger, yet cap rates blew out across the whole category anyway, leaving it 30 to 50% below replacement cost.
Survivors turned their stores into fulfillment engines.
Target fulfills 97% of digital orders from its stores and Dick's runs at 90%. One Dallas Best Buy booked $35M through the front door and another $55M out the back. That omni-channel volume, plus the buildout it requires, makes anchors structurally dependent on the physical box.
The supply shortage is structural, not cyclical.
New multi-tenant retail deliveries are down 76% since 2018 and vacancy sits near 4.5%. A new center costs roughly $650/sf to build and needs about $52 NNN rents to pencil, so almost nothing gets built and existing centers trade well below replacement cost.
The mispricing is the entire trade.
A fitness-anchored center trades at a 7 cap while apartments in the same market sit at a 5. With tenant retention north of 92% and rents rising, Brixton buys vacancy, redevelops the space, and expects cap rates to compress as institutional capital catches on.
The Brixton Capital Team
Grant Brutten is Director of Capital Markets at Brixton Capital, raising and structuring the private capital behind the firm's shopping center and multifamily acquisitions, spanning investor relations, underwriting, and partnership structuring. Before the capital markets role, he worked on Brixton's retail team managing tenant improvements, entitlements, and redevelopments, and began his career in construction with Suffolk. Grant holds a BA from Boston College and a Master of Science in Real Estate from the University of San Diego.
Rob Taylor is President and Chief Investment Officer of Brixton Capital, where he oversees acquisitions, capital markets, financing, and asset management. He brings more than 25 years of real estate experience, including over a decade at Invesco Real Estate, a $100 billion platform, where he ran residential strategies across the West and oversaw a single-family rental business of roughly 6,000 homes and $2.5 billion in AUM. He earlier held acquisitions roles at KBS Realty Advisors and Goldman Sachs. Rob holds an MBA from Claremont's Drucker School and a BA in finance from Loyola Marymount.