The out-of-state developer who has a purchase agreement on the vacant Macy’s building at Cortana Mall plans to subdivide the 225,000-square-foot space and lease it to multiple users, according to broker Ryan Pécot of Stirling Properties.
The deal has been in the works for several months, and details are still being finalized, but Pécot says he hopes to close on the sale some time this summer—possibly as soon as the end of the month.
“I’ve been saying ‘the end of the month’ for the past three months,” he says. “These things take time. But we have everybody’s attention right now and I’m hopeful by the end of July we’ll have closed on the asset.”
Pécot says the developer, whom he is representing in the transaction, plans to lease the space to multiple tenants for retail, service and entertainment venues.
“I think that’s increasingly the way you’ll see these old mall spaces being repurposed,” he says. “There just aren’t any 240,000-square-foot users out there —maybe a college, occasionally, but it’s more likely you’ll see these spaces subdivided.”
The Macy’s space was vacated in 2016, when the department store chain announced its Cortana location was one of 40 around the country it was shuttering.
Since then, J.C. Penney also announced the closure of its anchor store at Cortana, leaving the mall with just one anchor tenant: Dillard’s.
Cortana owner Moonbeam Equities has said since it acquired the mall in 2013 at the bargain basement price of $6 million, it intends to diversify the tenant mix of the 1.4-million square foot property and move toward nontraditional users. So far, however, it has made little progress and remains tight-lipped about its long-term plans.
—Stephanie Riegel
