It’s one thing to juggle project renderings, contractors and prospective tenants.
But delivering food, checking for extra ketchup and taking laps around a lot for parking? It was a new frontier for Frontier Real Estate Investments Vice President and Partner Tom Carpenter, who took up delivery driving to figure out how to optimize Rodeo 39 Public Market for what’s expected to be only an increase in third-party delivery service moving forward.
The Stanton retail and food center was mid-construction when COVID broke out. With 27 small tenants, 15 of those restaurants, the developer knew it had to be smart about how the project would operate.
“We were sitting there as a landlord saying with COVID ‘We don’t know how long it’s going to last. We don’t know what the new normal’s going to be. What can we do as a landlord to support these tenants?’” Carpenter said.
“A while back when we had met with our tenants at the end of last year, we said ‘We’re going to do our part to support you guys’ and then COVID hit, so it was like now’s the time to really honor our word.”
They began talking to a few tenants and brainstorming ideas, but driver concerns were missing from the conversations.
“Instead of us developers sitting around saying ‘Well I think the driver wants this or the driver wants that,’ I decided I’m going to sign up and drive, spend a few days doing it,” Carpenter said. “It was pretty apparent right away, the schedule for them is everything: you accept the delivery, you get a time when you’re supposed to be at the restaurant and then you have a time you have to deliver it by. It’s fast-paced and you get paid by the number of deliveries and tips.”
“But there’s also the question of how does that translate back into sales for tenants and the customer experience? How do we facilitate that process, speed up that process, but not get in the way of business?”
Carpenter applied to DoorDash and Postmates, clocking between six to eight hours each day. He kept his service area to Orange County.
“My first order was at Counter Burger and I went in and it was like ‘OK, I’m driving now. It was a little nerve-wracking and then all of a sudden you’re on to your next order and time is going by pretty quickly and you’re needing to do more and more orders,” Carpenter said.
Because he went the extra step, Frontier’s now better equipped to make decisions on parking stall layouts and they’ve streamlined a program for tenants that goes beyond simply posting on social media for restaurants or stores to say they’re open.
Rodeo 39’s Rodeo2Go was born out of all that market research, and is a comprehensive program for all center tenants offering a unified shopping experience to the consumer who doesn’t want to step foot onto the property. Frontier is also now armed with several ideas that could be implemented as they go and receive more feedback.
“On the retail side, landlords saw these shifts were happening and everybody’s aware of Amazon and the power of that,” Carpenter said. “There’s a lot of consolidation in the retail world and less traditional brick-and-mortar retail tenants out there. We feel strongly that, yes, people are going to order on Amazon because there’s a convenience factor to that, but they still want to go out and take their family out or still want a date night, so how do you find the balance between the two, and that’s what we’re trying to do as a landlord.”
—Kari Hamanaka
