(Excerpt) The owners of Laurel Mall last week announced a plan to turn the ailing shopping center into a walkable town center with restaurants, a movie theater and national chain retailers.The mall has been a sore spot on Route 1 in Prince George's County for years, steadily losing traffic and tenants. Sixteen percent of store space is empty, mall owners said, with Macy's, Burlington Coat Factory and International Furniture Liquidators as anchors.
Last year, real estate investment firms Somera Capital Management of Los Angeles and AEW Capital Management of Boston bought the center for $31 million from Blackstone Group of New York. The mall had encountered financial troubles and was placed in a court-appointed receivership the year before.
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Only 16% is empty. That doesn't sound like a high vacant rate. It still has three anchors. Am I missing something here?
ReplyDeleteYou're missing the fact that they want to turn this mall into one of those wonderful "lifestyle centers", whether it's actually empty and failing or not.
ReplyDeleteI knew that. I wasn't missing it. I just chose to ignore it. If I pretend that the problem doesn't exist I am hoping that the life style center plans will just go away.
ReplyDeleteI live near this mall, and just was inside of it today.
ReplyDeleteI can report to you that, even as the Post article has the owners citing a 16% vacancy rate, that was probably a figure from last year. By my eyes, the vacancy rate is well above 40%.
And most of the space is taken up by Captain Cheapo t-shirt and shoe-type places, with a hair cut place and nail salon to boot.
Every other place is boarded up and closed. An elevator that was there in the center of the mall no longer exists. And neither do 3/4ths of the stores that surrounded it.
The food court is a desolate place with only five chains in operation, including Subway, Taco Bell, Sbarro, some chicken place, and Boardwalk Fries.
And to top it all off, a parking garage that led to the Macy's collapsed a couple years ago. This mall has been in decline since 2001, and sorely needs to be razed.