The cycle turned
The expansion cycle turned. Store openings are rising and closings are slowing for the first time since the pandemic: roughly 5,500 openings this year, up more than 4%, against 7,900 closings, down about the same. Closings still lead in absolute terms, but the momentum has flipped, and that changes how deals move.
And the most interesting deals aren't greenfield. They're backfills. Off-price and discount chains are absorbing the boxes their fallen competitors left behind. Burlington alone is targeting north of a hundred net new stores, with a large share coming straight out of bankruptcy estates: recaptured Joann, Bed Bath, and Big Lots boxes. Dollar General, Aldi, and Tractor Supply are opening aggressively into the same map.
The good boxes have multiple suitors
Here's what that means on the ground: the good boxes have multiple suitors. A recaptured anchor space in a strong trade area isn't waiting for your committee's next monthly meeting. The landlord has three LOIs. The team that can evaluate it, defend the pick internally, and move as one unit (with its broker, its GC, its finance partner all on the same page) gets the box. The team running it on email doesn't.
So the question for this cycle isn't do we have good site data? Everyone has good site data. The question is: can your deal team actually move like a team?
What moving like a team looks like
Walk a backfill deal through, the way it actually happens.
A recaptured box comes available. Your analyst pulls it into an evaluation, not a one-off spreadsheet, but a structured workspace where the candidate gets weighted scored against your real criteria: trade area, co-tenancy, GLA fit, drive time. When a second analyst opens it, they see the same criteria and the same weights. You're not debating whose model to trust. You're looking at one.
The financial model lives on the site, not in an email. Acquisition and operating assumptions, the returns math: versioned, in one place, so when your CFO wants a harder downside case, they're editing the model everyone can see, not spawning a fork.
The risks and pros-and-cons get written down. On the record. Because a backfill has real ones (deferred maintenance in a box that sat empty, a co-tenancy clause that changed when the anchor went dark), and the discipline of naming them now is what keeps them from surfacing at closing.
Then it moves through a sequential approval chain. Real estate director, then finance, then committee, each with the full context, each leaving a timestamped decision. When the box is yours and someone asks in a year why this site?, the answer is right there: the scores, the model, the risks, the approvals. Not reconstructed from memory. Reconstructed from the record.
Where the coalition comes in
None of that works if half the inputs are trapped outside your company.
The broker who knows the landlord's real timeline. The GC who can tell you whether that empty box is a six-week conversion or a six-month one. The franchisee who's actually going to operate it. In most tools, those people are outsiders you manage by attachment: you email them a PDF and hope the version doesn't drift.
In MYDealTeams they're members of the deal, scoped by trust level, working from the same record. The GC's delivery estimate updates where the deal lives. The broker's note about the competing LOI is visible to the whole team the moment it matters, not a week later. That's the difference between a coalition that moves as one and a group of companies emailing each other. And in a cycle where the good boxes have three suitors, that difference is the deal.
The honest version
We're not going to tell you a tool wins deals. People win deals. But in an expansion cycle this competitive, the constraint isn't your data or your talent. It's the friction between the people who have to decide together and can't see the same thing at the same time. That friction is what we built to remove.
The rollout is back on. If you're running it across spreadsheets and email threads, the team on the other side of the box may not be.
MYDealTeams is free during Early Access: Community free, Pro $69/month, everything free while we're in Early Access. Nothing to lose, and a deal team to organize.
Sources: [CRE Daily](https://www.credaily.com/briefs/retail-openings-edge-up-as-closings-slow-in-2026/) · [Schuckman Realty: The Backfill Economy](https://www.schuckmanrealty.com/the-backfill-economy-whos-absorbing-americas-empty-boxes-july-2026-retail-real-estate-outlook/)