We've spent the last year working retail real estate in Ohio — sourcing sites, structuring leases, and getting deals across the line in markets where most national retailers don't have the broker coverage they think they do.

Most third-party representation in Ohio lives in Ohio. Their relationships are local, their territory is local, and their attention follows whatever's directly in front of them. That's not a knock — it's how the business works. But it leaves gaps. Retailers expanding into the state often inherit broker relationships that have gone cold, or get assigned to someone splitting time with a dozen other markets.

CRE360 Partners works differently. We're a fully mobile retail brokerage team that embeds in a market for the duration of an assignment. When a national retailer needs to expand into Ohio, we do the work in Ohio — physically — until the deals are done.

Tenant representation and site selection across Ohio

In 2025, CRE360 was retained to lead the Ohio rollout for a national footwear and apparel retailer expanding under two banners. The mandate covered every major Ohio metro outside Cincinnati. Their internal real estate team was stretched, and the broker they had been working with in Ohio had effectively semi-retired to Florida — a familiar pattern in retail real estate when long-tenured brokers stop chasing new business.

Two of us spent roughly five months on the ground in Ohio. We built a full opportunity pipeline — every available shopping center, every co-tenancy fit, every landlord we could pry information from — and tracked it down to the floor plan, asking rent, and ownership detail. By the time we were finished, we had executed seven deals with two more rounding out, including three in Toledo, where the retailer had no prior presence and needed multiple stores opening simultaneously to establish brand recognition.

Solving the lease problems most brokers walk away from

Two of those Ohio deals were with one of the largest retail REITs in the country. Our client and the REIT didn't have an established working relationship at the time — the two sides hadn't been able to align on lease language, and most landlords would default to the easy answer: "We have an exclusive in place. We can't make this work."

That's where landlord-side experience matters. Before launching CRE360, members of our team spent years on the landlord side of the table. We know how exclusive use clauses actually function in practice, where the flexibility is, and how to draft language that protects everyone. On one of those Ohio deals, we drafted custom exclusive language that allowed our client to operate under the existing tenant's square footage threshold. The landlord's attorneys signed off. The deal got done. And the relationship that was built through those Ohio transactions has since opened doors to additional deals between the same parties in other markets.

That kind of creative problem-solving is what separates a transaction broker from a leasing partner. Most landlords don't actually care about exclusives — they care about getting deals done. If you can come to them with the landlord's perspective in mind and offer a path through, you create deals where there was none to be had.

What Ohio actually looks like as a retail market

Ohio is four distinct sub-markets — Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati — plus a set of underrated secondary markets that retailers consistently overlook. The state has historically been a strong testing ground for new retail concepts because the demographics sit squarely in middle America. Concepts that work in Ohio tend to work elsewhere.

The economy is more diversified than most people realize. Banking, medical, manufacturing, and education provide enough industry mix to keep the major metros resistant to the big swings you see in less diverse economies. Cleveland has reinvented itself over the last decade. Columbus has been growing steadily — Google has now invested more than $7 billion across its New Albany, Columbus, and Lancaster data center campuses, and the broader corridor continues to attract capital. The Intel chip facility is on hold, but the underlying retail fundamentals don't depend on it.

The real constraint in Ohio right now isn't demand — it's supply. Marcus & Millichap's 2026 Columbus retail forecast shows vacancy hovering around 4.5%, roughly 200 basis points below the market's historical average, with North Columbus and Delaware County running closer to 2.5%. Quality retail real estate in the right co-tenancy is genuinely tight, and that's where local market knowledge earns its keep.

The market most retailers miss

Grove City, on the southwest side of Columbus, is a sub-market with a blue-collar reputation that doesn't match its actual retail performance. When we were sourcing sites in Ohio for a national retailer, Grove City wasn't on their initial target list. We brought them the demographics, walked them through the co-tenancy in the existing centers, and the retailer ended up genuinely interested in pursuing a store there. That's the kind of insight you only get from being in the market — not browsing it from a satellite image.