From the high-end Natick Mall to Solomon Pond Mall to the Mall at Whitney Field and elsewhere, retail plazas already struggling with closing chains are now facing an even more uncertain future because of the pandemic.
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The Natick Mall could be the envy of most shopping malls anywhere: more than 200 stores, a whole wing devoted to luxury retail shops, and a location amid the Boston area’s wealthy western suburbs.
The mall, though, is not immune from the challenges facing retail – a long-running shrinking of storefronts nationally made far more acute by the coronavirus pandemic. The Natick Mall will soon face the departure of two of its anchors – Neiman Marcus and Lord & Taylor – at a time when so much shopping has shifted online, at least temporarily.
The Natick Mall isn’t alone.
Next door, Shoppers World in Framingham still has vacancies from Bob’s Stores, Babies ‘R’ Us and Joe’s American Bar & Grill leaving. Across the street, a former Michaels arts and crafts store sits empty.
Solomon Pond Mall in Marlborough – which lists about 15 vacancies – is indefinitely without its movie theater complex, after Regal said in early October it was closing all of its locations. The Mall at Whitney Field in Leominster has lost its Macy’s, after having lost a few dozen tenants in the past five years.
“It’s all going online,” Bill Manley, the CEO and founder of real estate investment firm Calare Properties of Framingham. “When you go to a mall right now, it’s kind of a ghost town.”
Even outdoor plazas, which benefit from both the safety of the outdoors and longer-term trends favoring them over indoor malls, are having challenges.
Lincoln Plaza in Worcester has three vacant storefronts in a row: Staples, Barnes & Noble and A.C. Moore, as well as a Ruby Tuesday. Northborough Crossing has vacancies from where Jos. A Bank, Dress Barn and Charming Charlie once had stores. A shopping center on Route 9 in Shrewsbury has lost two adjacent tenants this year: Bed, Bath & Beyond and Pier 1 Imports.
A national crisis
Central Massachusetts shopping centers aren’t alone in their struggles, of course.
More than 8,000 retail stores have closed so far this year, according to the New York firm Coresight Research, with only roughly 3,400 store openings to partially offset that troubling number. Roughly 9,500 retail stores closed last year, when the economy was still growing strong, according to the business website MoneyWise.
As of September, roughly 129 million square feet of retail space nationally had or was closing, according to the Washington D.C. analytics firm CoStar.
Lord & Taylor is one in a group of notable retailers to file for bankruptcy since the coronavirus pandemic began, along with J. Crew, JCPenney, GNC, Brooks Brothers and Tailored Brands, the parent company of Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank.
More vacancies may well be on the way. Gap, for example, said in October it would close 350 locations of its flagship stores and Banana Republic. The health store GNC is down to five Central Massachusetts locations, and Men’s Wearhouse is down to four.
Those closures have had a clear effect on local malls. The Mall at Whitney Field, for example, lists 43 tenants today, down from 75 five years ago.
Whitney Field was bought by a Georgia-based shopping mall management company, Hull Property Group, in December 2019. The price of the $16-million deal indicated the mall’s potentially challenging future, with one of its anchor stores, Sears, having closed and two others, Macy’s and JCPenney, having long-term struggles. JCPenney filed for bankruptcy this year.
The mall’s previous owner, Colony Capital of Los Angeles, paid $36 million for the property in 2013, more than twice the price the company now sold it for. The Hull Property Group didn’t return a message seeking comment on its plans for the mall.
Worcester’s Greendale Mall is hurting the most of any indoor shopping center in Central Massachusetts, and its future is most at question.
The mall today is mostly empty, with much of its traffic for a single store: a T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods. A preliminary plan by Boston-based Finard Properties, which bought the Greendale Mall late last year for $7.1 million, called for tearing down the existing mall to build a lifestyle center featuring shops, restaurants, medical offices and apartments.
When asked by WBJ, Finard said it didn’t have any updates to provide on its plans for the site.
Manley is frank about the potentially bleak prospects of some malls.
“There’s going to be some malls that just aren’t going to come back,” he said, describing the pandemic as compressing a shift toward online shopping from a span of years into just weeks. “The big joke used to be that Best Buy was Amazon’s showroom. That’s not even happening anymore.”
Few options left
The Natick Mall has survived the closure of stores before, including anchor tenants. A former JCPenney is now a two-story Wegmans grocery store, and a former Sears has been occupied in part by a Dave & Buster’s entertainment complex.
Now there are others the mall will need to fill, too, including a two-story American Girl store that was one of just 20 such locations nationwide. The mall has about two dozen vacancies in all.
“They’re going to have a very hard time replacing those anchors, because the market is just thinning,” Manley said.
Grocery stores have been a rare beneficiary of the pandemic, as more people cook and eat at home. Shopping centers have increasingly looked away from apparel and other retailers whose goods can easily be bought online, and more toward what are called experiential tenants, such as entertainment centers.
The Natick Mall, however, isn’t likely to have another grocery store or entertainment center to turn to – and besides, experiential tenants are being hit hard in the short-term.
“Those saving graces now become more of a risk,” CoStar market analyst Todd Galvin said.
The mall is less likely to accept down-scale options such as temporary stores or trampoline parks just to occupy space, said Adin Perera, a senior market analyst at the real estate analysis firm CoStar.
The Greendale Mall’s challenging future may be rivaled locally only by the Quarry Square Shopping Center in Milford. The plaza has 135,000 square feet of contiguous space available after Stop & Shop, T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods all decamped for Milford Crossing, a remodeled plaza just over a mile away.
Quarry Square and plazas like it do have a few factors working in their favor, though: They’re not in areas especially reliant on adjacent office workers, densely populated neighborhoods or tourism, according to Perera and Galvin.
Notably, the area’s newest shopping centers aren’t looking particularly like the old ones, especially with their inclusion of residential or office components, and a more typical reliance on grocery stores as anchors.
In Shrewsbury, the Lakeway Commons development opened in 2017 is anchored by a Whole Foods Market and includes 250 apartments and 14 townhouses. So will Edgemere Crossing at Flint Pond, a Market Basket-anchored redevelopment of the former drive-in movie theater site of the same name on Route 20 in Shrewsbury. That project is slated to have 250 apartments.
Apex Center of New England in Marlborough has two hotels, an office building and an entertainment complex. Meadow Walk in Sudbury, anchored by a Whole Foods, includes 250 apartments, 60 active-adult condominiums and a 48-unit assisted living community. In Maynard, another Market Basket-anchored development, called Maynard Crossing, includes a 180-unit apartment complex and a 143-unit senior independent living community.
