The Grove’s Rick Caruso: ‘We’re in the business of enriching lives’
Rick Caruso, forward-thinking developer of The Grove in Los Angeles, admits that he knew nothing about retail real estate when he started leasing parking lots in the 1980s.
His father, Henry Caruso, was the founder of Dollar-Rent-A-Car and owned several car dealerships in the L.A. area. Rick earned a law degree from Pepperdine in 1983 and took a job as a real estate lawyer at a New York City firm. Four years later, he formed Caruso, a commercial real estate development and management company that got its start purchasing parking lots leased by his dad’s rental car company.
In a recent conversation with Nordstrom president and chief brand officer Pete Nordstrom on his podcast “The Nordy Pod,” Caruso claimed that his lack of experience in real estate played a huge role in the development of his company’s influential lifestyle centers, which also include The Americana at Brand and The Lakes at Thousand Oaks in California.
“I think that was a great gift to me because it gave me permission to do things differently,” Caruso told Nordstrom. “When you take a look at our properties, they’re not the typical indoor malls. They’re very different. And it was always this idea that I wanted to create places [where] people would be interested in hanging out and coming to and enjoying life and a sense of community and having open space.”
Caruso said that his vision for The Grove, which opened in 2002, was that it be not so much a shopping destination as a gathering destination.
“The Grove today continues to be in the top one, two, or three centers in per-square-foot sales in the country,” he said. “But it’s driven by the fact that it’s an experience that people can come [to] not just to shop or to dine, but just to come and hang out. And that’s why the open space is critically important.”
The parking-lot-turned-prime-retail-real-estate developer told Nordstrom that knowing nothing about shopping centers gave him and the leaders of his company the freedom to explore just what retail-based centers in the 21st Century should be all about.
“We will not say we’re in the development business. We’re not going to say we’re in the real estate business. We’re not going to say we’re in the resort business,” Caruso remarked. “We say, ‘We’re in the business of enriching people’s lives.'”