Shay Angelo/Gem Prep PocatelloĪccording to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Amazon
Gem Prep Pocatello charter school opened last year in a former Sears store in the Pine Ridge Mall in Chubback, Idaho.
“The empty stores in malls can be turned into these micro fulfillment centers,” he said. Ziff said retailers, including direct-to-consumer sellers, are racing to find empty spaces closer to their consumers in urban areas to create micro warehouses in order to speed up order deliveries. The popularity of online shopping and same-day delivery has also boosted demand for spaces to serve as last-mile delivery fulfillment centers. We have to go out there and sell these ideas because supply is greatly outstripping demand for space right now.” “As mall operators, we can’t just sit on our hands and wait for people to come to us. The Landings is a complex of three shopping centers in Columbus, Georgia encompassing approximately 300,000 square feet of open-air retail.Īnd at its indoor mall in Maryville, Tennessee, Ziff said a vacating JCPenney store is also drawing a lot of interest from non-retail businesses, including a tenant in the healthcare space. So you have to be nimble and creative with who to lease it to and go out there and pull in a different type of tenant,” he said.Īt one of its properties – The Landings in Columbus, Georgia – Ziff said the company is signing leases with local retailers and restaurateurs but noted that there’s been an increase of doctors and dentist offices signing leases across Time Equities’ portfolio. “Now, supply of available space is up and retailer demand is softer. “Pre-Covid there was an oversupply of retail space across the US,” said Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities, which owns and manages hundreds of retail properties across the United States, including enclosed malls, free-standing stores and open air malls.Ī former Sears at the Grand Teton Mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho is being repurposed into a public school. In this environment, replacing a shuttered store with another store could likely backfire.Īlternatively, mall developers say they’re scouting for businesses other than retailers to replace shuttered stores, anything from schools to doctors offices and short and long-term storage facilities both for residential and commercial customers. The stakes are high for mall developers, who are now repurposing the vacant space in a variety of ways. “As we start to recover from the pandemic, it is highly unlikely that vacancy trends will swing back to pre-Covid-19 levels” he said. “The coronavirus crisis kicked the long-simmering rise of e-commerce into high gear,” said Calanog.
“I suspect that this rate will continue to float upwards over the next five years,” said Victor Calanog, head of commercial real estate economics with (REIS) Moody’s Analytics.
With mall vacancies accelerating at a rapid clip amid a surge in online shopping, landlords are quickly looking for other ways to reuse the glut of empty stores that will help boost traffic to shopping centers.Īccording to data from research firm (REIS) Moody’s Analytics, the rate of mall vacancies is at a historic high of 9.8% in early September, exceeding the previous peak of 9.3% in 2011. But their trips might have little or nothing to do with shopping. Consumers will still be heading to malls in the future.
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