Tag Archive for: retail space reuse

Neon - Vacancy 2354

The pandemic is expected to drastically reshape commercial real estate, leaving thousands of vacant and underused spaces nationwide. But some developers and investors are keen to seize the chance to convert those properties into other uses.

Lord & Taylor’s flagship department store in Manhattan, for example, will soon house office workers for Amazon, and a tourist destination in the heart of Hollywood is getting a $100 million face-lift that includes converting underused retail spaces into offices.

“Nobody ever lets a crisis get in the way of creating opportunity,” said Sheila Botting of Avison Young, a commercial real estate services firm in Toronto, where she is president of the professional services practice for the Americas.

Conversion waves in the past were often localized. For instance, more than 13.8 million square feet in lower Manhattan changed over after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York. But those shifts were nothing on the scale that is expected in the next 18 to 24 months, experts say.

In retail alone, at least 7,700 stores totaling 115 million square feet were expected to close this year as of early August, according to data provided by CoStar Advisory Services. Most of these closures will be in malls, which were struggling long before the pandemic pushed department stores like JCPenney and Neiman Marcus into bankruptcy.

At the same time, 172.7 million square feet of Class A office space, typically the highest quality, is expected to come online this year and next. Only 59% of it has been leased, below the average of 74%, according to the CoStar data. And nearly 1 in 4 hotels nationwide faces possible foreclosure as owners fall behind at least a month on loans, the American Hotels & Lodging Association said. Simply put, a lot more space is going to be available out there.

“If there was a sudden drop in demand for Cheerios, General Mills would just pull the Cheerios,” said Victor Calanog, head of commercial real estate economics at Moody’s Analytics. “Then there’s going to be less, and prices won’t have to fall as much. But once you’ve built an office building, you can’t exactly take it off the market.”

Some of the causes of the national oversupply in commercial real estate predate the pandemic. For example, the shift to e-commerce has hastened many stores to the grave in recent years — more than 10,200 stores closed in 2019, according to CoStar.

Also, businesses that use offices have been pulling back on space amid rising digitization and other efficiencies as well as demographic shifts — younger generations in general are comfortable with less office space. The commercial real estate industry’s rule of thumb in the 1980s was 200 to 300 square feet per employee, according to Moody’s Analytics. By 2019, the average had fallen to 126.5.

And industries as diverse as real estate, media, technology and banking have been flirting with more telecommuting for decades. Moreover, a sizable chunk of leased space goes largely unused during the workday anyway — estimates place it at 30% to 40% — as people are out of the office for various reasons. But the crisis has created a chance for some developers to reassess their strategy.

“I think for the real estate community, this represents a moment in time to think about current assets, how they’re being used and what future options might be,” Botting said.

The starkest example yet of this approach might be Amazon’s possible plans to convert JCPenney and Sears stores in shopping centers owned by mall operator Simon Property Group into distribution warehouses, which was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The e-commerce giant is also behind the overhaul of the shuttered Lord & Taylor store on Fifth Avenue, turning 676,000 square feet into office space for about 2,000 employees by 2023. Amazon declined to comment for this article.

Last month, DJM Capital Partners, a real estate services firm, and private equity firm Gaw Capital Partners revealed plans to overhaul the Hollywood & Highland, a Hollywood entertainment complex on the same block as the Dolby Theater, which hosts the Academy Awards. Those plans call for carving nearly 100,000 square feet of creative office space out of existing retail.

“When the firms bought the complex last year, they had a low opinion of the future of traditional brick-and-mortar retail,” said Stenn Parton, chief retail officer of DJM. “Then the coronavirus shut down thousands of businesses across the country. If anything, I think it’s solidified our business plan as we’ve seen the record store closures as a result of the pandemic.”

Most conversions won’t be as grand; instead, they’ll involve smaller and less heralded properties. Still, a wide variety of conversion projects is expected.

“Developers see an opportunity in converting hotels into continuing care retirement communities,” said David Reis, chief executive of Senior Care Development in Harrison, New York. “It’s less expensive to convert a property than build from the ground up, especially in expensive markets such as New York. If you can buy space for the equivalent of 50 cents on the dollar less than new construction, then clearly you’re going to be fine when you do a conversion.”

Nationally, new residential construction generally average $225 to $350 a square foot, compared with $150 to $200 for an office-to-residential conversion, according to a report provided by project management firm Cumming. For industrial construction, the average new project costs $125 to $250 a square foot, but that can fall to $75 to $175 for a retail-to-industrial switch.

Despite the potential for lower costs and the emerging universe of options, commercial real estate conversions do pose challenges. Zoning and technical design can stymie some changeovers. And it can be more difficult to draw financing for conversions during the pandemic, when lenders are more averse to risk.

“Core and stabilized assets are drawing financing opportunities,” said Eric Rosenthal, a co-founder of Machine Investment Group, a real estate investment firm. “Transition stories, or when there’s an element of execution beyond just buying it and managing the property, the environment to finance those assets is very challenging.”

Traditionally, the best conversions have increasingly been obsolete properties.

“Typically, if they’re older and they’ve gone beyond their useful life — reduced occupancy, reduced cash flow — they are ripe for transformation,” Botting of Avison Young said.

In an undated image from Related Companies, a rendering of what an office conversion could look like in the Neiman Marcus space at Hudson Yards in New York. (IMAGE CREDIT: Related Companies via The New York Times)

But even newer properties are on the table. Neiman Marcus opened a 188,000-square-foot flagship store at Manhattan’s Hudson Yards just last year as the anchor retail tenant in the nation’s largest private real estate development. Now the Related Cos., owner of Hudson Yards, is pivoting. Philippe Visser, president of Related Office Development, said by email that the store would become “the most exciting office opportunity in New York City.”

The move harks to previous crises that forced a metamorphosis in commercial real estate. In the 1990s, lower Manhattan was racked by high office vacancies and population drain, and William C. Rudin, president of New York landlord Rudin Management, helped lead efforts to rejuvenate the area. More than 4.6 million square feet was converted from 1995 to 2001 — including glassy office buildings no one thought would make decent apartments.

“When things get bad enough,” Rudin said, “it forces people to come together and come up with ideas.”

 

Source: SFBJ

boynton beach mall

What is going to happen to America’s dead malls? That’s a million-dollar question plaguing retailers and real estate developers.

With a report circulating earlier this month that the biggest U.S. mall owner Simon Property Group has been in talks with Amazon to convert some shuttered Sears and J.C. Penney department stores into fulfillment centers, many industry analysts have been pontificating on the future of malls as logistics hubs.

The consensus seems to be that turning old retail space into new warehouses might not be so easy, even though it might seem like a logical solution. Demand for logistics buildings is skyrocketing as e-commerce sales balloon. But the hurdles include the need to have properties rezoned, which could be met with pushback from local municipalities.

“Just because retail space has gone vacant or remained fallow does not mean that it is automatically a good candidate for repurposing into industrial space,” the head of Moody’s Analytics commercial real estate economics division, Victor Calanog, said in a report just released. “One cannot simply build industrial buildings in areas zoned for commercial use. Often, that requires rezoning areas — a long and tedious process with a low probability of success. State and local governments typically tax industrial properties at anywhere from half to two-thirds the rate of commercial properties, so municipalities have little incentive to rezone areas from commercial to industrial use, as they will collect less tax revenues.”

Demand for various commercial real estate asset types is expected to shift noticeably because of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people now working from home, flocking to the suburbs for space and buying online things they used to browse for in stores.

According to data pulled by Moody’s Analytics REIS, apartment development in the U.S. is expected to be down 15.6% in a post-Covid-19 world. Office development is set to drop 10%, it said, while retail falls 15.7%. Industrial development, meantime, is expected to pick up 3.6%.

The firm did find five markets where it said it would make the most sense to covert vacant retail space into warehouse space, based on where retail has been underperforming and where warehouse demand is hot. Those are: Central New Jersey, Northern New Jersey, Long Island, Memphis and Detroit.

But shopping malls are likely going to be shuttering in suburbs all across the country, as store closures grow in number and landlords capitulate. Another new report out this week from Coresight Research estimates 25% of America’s roughly 1,000 malls will close over the next three to five years, with the pandemic accelerating a demise that was already underway before the new virus emerged.

The malls most at risk of going dark are classified as so-called B-, C- and D-rated malls, meaning they bring in fewer sales per square foot than an A mall. An A++ mall could bring in as much as $1,000 in sales per square foot, for example, while a C+ mall does about $320. There are roughly 380 C- and D-rated malls in the U.S., according to an analysis by the commercial real estate firm Green Street Advisors. It has said malls rated C and below “are not viable retail centers long term.”

CBL & Associates, a Tennessee-based mall owner that has a number of B- and C-rated malls in its portfolio, has said it plans to file for bankruptcy by Oct. 1, highlighting just how much pressure these landlords are facing. Even high-end malls are under pressure, though. No one is really immune. An upscale mall owner in Miami, Bal Harbour Shops, is currently moving to evict the luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue for not paying rent since mid-March. It owes Bal Harbour roughly $1.9 million, according to court documents.

“Despite being given months to honor its past due rental obligations and despite Saks’ impressive post-COVID sales at Bal Harbour Shops, Saks steadfastly refused to make any effort to pay any part of its rent,” Bal Harbour Shops President and Chief Executive Matthew Whitman Lazenby said in a statement. “Bal Harbour Shops has worked tirelessly to ensure our business and our tenants can survive and thrive in this environment. Regrettably, this injudicious behavior has left us with no other option than to terminate the Saks lease and sue to evict Saks from Bal Harbour Shops.”

A representative from Hudson’s Bay-owned Saks was not immediately available to comment.

About 90% of occupants in U.S. malls are either experiential tenants like movie theaters, or department store chains and apparel retailers, according to the Coresight analysis. This makes malls the most vulnerable type of shopping centers to the Covid-19 impact, it said, compared with other properties like strip centers that have grocery stores and outlet centers that offer consumers bargains.

During the pandemic, movie theaters and clothing shops have faced long windows of being closed, while consumers could still flock to strip centers for food, cleaning products and other essentials. In some states, such as New York and California, movie theaters remain closed to this day. And so with minimal revenue coming in, these are the businesses that are most likely requesting rent reductions, or not paying rent at all.

Mall developers had up until now been courting entertainment companies like Dave & Buster’s and iFly indoor skydiving, and restaurants like Cheesecake Factory, to lessen their dependence on shrinking retailers. But those businesses have also not fared well in an age of social distancing.

So, if not warehouses and entertainment complexes, analysts have pondered other potential use cases for so-called dead malls: Churches, medical facilities, office spaces and even apartment complexes.

But even office space is a risky bet now, as the working-from-home trend could become permanent for some. Workers in JPMorgan Chase’s corporate and investment bank, for example, will cycle between days spent at the office and at home, keeping the ability to work remotely on a part-time basis. The world’s biggest Wall Street bank by revenue has said it could shutter backup trading floors located outside New York and London as a result of the move.

The outdoor retailer REI is also looking to sell its recently completed corporate campus in suburban Seattle, shifting instead to more satellite offices, as a result of the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, this whole Covid thing has thrown the experiential pitch out the window,” Moody’s Calanog said in a phone interview. “Until we resolve this pandemic, I suspect we are going to be in a holding pattern with hollow retail space. Then we will see what the most viable format is.”

View the CNBC news video ‘How Shrinking the American Mall Will Impact Local Tax Revenue‘ below.

Source: CNBC

The likely liquidation of Toys R Us, the nation’s largest independent toy seller, could add stress for the companies that make toys and games, and mean changes for the owners of the strip malls where most of its stores are. Not to mention its impact on more than Toys R Us‘s 30,000 U.S. workers.

Here’s a look.

What Happens To Toy Makers?

Toy companies, both big and small, will lose a place to test new toys. Toys R Us was a launchpad for emerging trends and toys, such as ZhuZhu Pets, which were the must-have holiday toy in 2008.

“Toys R Us was known as an incubator,” said Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of toy review site TTPM.com.

The toy makers will also have to find new places to sell their goods.

“The bigger toy makers — Hasbro and Mattel — will likely hurt at first, but then find their footing at Walmart, Target and Amazon,” says Richard Gottlieb, a consultant at Global Toy Experts.

Toys R Us accounts for about 11 percent of Mattel’s annual sales and about 9 percent of Hasbro‘s annual volume, analysts estimate. Both have posted lackluster financial results of late, and there was talk last year about the possibility of a merger between them.

But smaller toy companies will have a harder time. Silver believes they will be hurt more than Mattel Inc. and Hasbro Inc. since Toys R Us could account for up to 40 percent of their overall business. And big stores, such as Walmart and Target, are less likely to sell smaller brands because they have less space to sell toys. Stephanie Wissink, a toy analyst at Jefferies, wrote in a recent note that small companies will explore selling themselves to survive. She thinks that Hasbro and Mattel will be best positioned to add more small- to medium-sized toy makers to their portfolios.

What Happens To The Real Estate?

Real estate executives offer different opinions on whether landlords can easily fill the holes at the strip centers where most of the Toys R Us locations are.

“Given the chain’s issues, the closings aren’t a shock to landlords, and they’ve already been trying to line up possible tenants to replace Toys R Us over the past few months,” said Katy Welsh, a senior vice president at the southern Florida division of the commercial real estate brokerage firm Colliers International.

Welsh says she’s been working with a number of companies like Glowzone, an entertainment park, and Lucky Markets, which offers beer tastings in its stores, which would be interested in taking some of the spaces nationwide.

“You have to look at this as an opportunity to reposition that store,” Welsh said.

But Suzanne Mulvee, director of research for CoStar, a real estate research firm, says that 51 percent, or 450 Toys R Us’s stores are in shopping centers considered low-quality. So landlords could struggle to replace them with tenants at similar rates — or worse, they could remain vacant, she says. She says she also believes that matching the size of the box, which average about 30,000 square feet, could be difficult as well.

“The sweet spot seems to be boxes that are under 25,000 square feet, ” Mulvee says.

What Happens To The Brand?

Toys R Us, as a well-known and long-lasting brand, may yet have a future — the company even quoted its classic jingle in its bankruptcy filings. And other seemingly dead retailers have a way of coming back to life.

American Apparel, which closed all its stores last year after filing for bankruptcy, was revived by another company as an online-only clothing store. FAO Schwarz, which Toys R Us once owned, is opening shops inside department stores in the U.S. and China. And Sharper Image, which also shut its stores, now sells gadgets online and opened a New York pop-up shop during the holidays last year.

 

Source: Miami Herald

Just off Independence Boulevard, workers are resurrecting an old Super Kmart into a new incarnation: A call center and office space, the latest example of owners finding new uses for a defunct big-box store.

Over on Arrowood Road, a former Walmart is also being reshaped into office space and a call center. And on Freedom Drive, workers are renovating another former Kmart into a charter school.

It’s happening across the U.S.: More developers are looking at how to creatively reuse empty big-box stores, titans of the American retail landscape that now face ever-increasing pressure from online retailers and specialty shops. Elsewhere, empty stores have become libraries, gyms, even churches.

“It’s a cool repurposing of the buildings,” said Tom Fitzgerald, vice president at JLL, which is marketing the former Super Kmart, now known as INQ@2401.

The interior of a former Kmart and Steve & Barry’s store on Sardis Road North in Charlotte, NC. The store is one of several vacant big box retailers that’s getting a new life – in this case, as office space. (PHOTO CREDIT: Ely Portillo Charlotte Observer)

The store was most recently a Steve & Barry’s apparel shop, before that company went bankrupt. Verizon has signed a lease for more than half of the 165,000-square-foot building, and is planning to move hundreds of workers to a new call center there this fall.

Kmart is owned by Sears Holdings, a company that’s been shuttering hundreds of stores in a bid to survive. In January, the company added its Concord store to the list of closures. Department stores such as Macy’s and JCPenney have been aggressively closing stores to try to boost their results, while companies like Walmart and Target that opened thousands of new mega-stores in recent decades are throttling back their store counts, trimming unprofitable locations.

And when those stores close, they can leave a big hole – especially when they’re standalone stores surrounded by acres and acres of parking. The empty parking lots and giant, fading shadows of store logos are hard to miss, and they send an unmistakable signal: Hey, this place is struggling.

But the very things that make empty big-box stores such prominent blights when they fold can also make them attractive targets for redevelopment. High ceilings, totally open floor plans and walls that can be knocked out for big windows mean the buildings work as office space. And the huge parking lots that the buildings come with mean they can offer exceptionally high amounts of parking free to employees – eight spaces or so per 1,000 square feet, well above what even most suburban office parks provide. All those parking spaces and wide-open floor plans mean tenants can fit a large number of employees into a dense arrangement of workstations, making an empty Kmart or Walmart particularly conducive to rebirth as a call center.

That was part of the allure for White Oak Real Estate Advisors, which bought a former Walmart on East Arrowood Road for $3.8 million last month. The building had been owned by the adjacent Victory Christian Center, which used it for various purposes, including a Salvation Army center. Now, work is underway to turn the building into high-density office and call center space. The building has a high parking ratio – again, eight spots per 1,000 square feet of office space – and is also adjacent to the Arrowood Station on the Blue Line light rail.

Jessica Brown of Cushman & Wakefield, who is marketing the property to prospective tenants, said that combination of light rail access and lots of parking means companies can fit even more employees into the building.

“You can stack the density even greater if you need to,” said Brown. Another important advantage a reused retail building has over a new structure: Quicker construction and fewer delays. You know for certain you can deliver it within a specific time frame. The ability to deliver quickly, with no variables, is huge.”

The Movement Foundation is on track to open a new charter school this year on Freedom Drive, in a defunct Kmart the group purchased for $4.3 million. The nonprofit, affiliated with Movement Mortgage, is spending almost $8 million more renovating and refurbishing the property.

‘It Was In Terrible Shape’

When Peter Tonon saw the vacant Super Kmart on Sardis Road North, his first thought was: “When I moved here 22 years ago, that was the first place I bought diapers for the kids. It was in terrible shape,” said Tonon, a partner at Mainstreet Capital Partners. But he saw potential in the site, which he bought in 2015 with DRA Advisors for $3.4 million. Now, with a new roof, HVAC system and windows, and Verizon leasing more than 90,000 square feet, Tonon said the investment is paying off. About 72,000 square feet are still available.

Even with the renovation costs, Tonon said buying a dead big-box store is more cost-effective than building new, especially with construction costs rising. Also, there aren’t a lot of sites that large within the city limits that have so much parking and a large structure already built.

“We’re in it for a lot less than it would cost to build this kind of thing,” said Tonon. “To get 24 acres and lay out that parking, wow. That’s pretty tough to do. Maybe out in the sticks.”

 

Source: Miami Herald