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Filling the void
By Karl Henkel
YOUNGSTOWN
ECONOMISTS EXPECT Americans’ spending habits to be tempered this holiday season. It may be a lack of consumer confidence — now at the second- lowest level since the inception of the Consumer Confidence Index — but it’s not for a lack of options.
The Mahoning Valley’s biggest shopping malls — Eastwood Mall in Niles and Southern Park Mall in Boardman — have seen greater mall capacity levels during the past few years after the recession, giving customers a few extra options.
But it’s still not perfect. In the Valley, about one in 10 square feet of area malls remained vacant during the third quarter.
The mall-vacancy rate has teetered at 9.3 percent since the second quarter of 2010 and hasn’t fallen below 9 percent since 2008, just as the recession first took effect, according to statistics from CoStar Group, which provides building-specific information to the United States commercial real-estate industry and related industries.
CoStar calculates the vacancy rate by dividing the vacant square footage by the mall’s total square footage; it is not based on the individual space count.
But at Southern Park mall, business has been better than usual.
The mall has filled nearly all of its 130 spaces before the busy holiday-shopping season and will welcome a trio of new stores — Shoe Department, Best Buy Mobile and Fox — sometime next month.
“We’re in the best shape we’ve been in for quite some time,” said Sheryl Raulin, marketing director at Southern Park Mall. “We’re seeing a level of activity that we haven’t seen since the recession hit.”
The mall’s biggest hole — the 38,000-square-foot space formerly occupied by Jillian’s — remains its only Achilles heel.
Raulin said the space has drawn “strong interest,” but said that no new tenant is imminent.
The mall has even asked some local tenants to shift to smaller locations to make room for corporate retailers such as Fox and rue 21, a specialty discount retailer of young men and women’s casual apparel and accessories.
“Retailers seem more optimistic,” Raulin said.
Eastwood Mall hasn’t had near the success that Southern Park Mall has enjoyed.
It’s vacancy rate was 18.9 per-cent during the third quarter, according to CoStar, though that number is skewed slightly.
Joe Bell, director of corporate communications for The Cafaro Co., which owns the mall, said the current vacancy rate is about 7 percent to 8 percent.
Eastwood Mall calculates vacancy rates based on square footage. It currently has 217 occupied or soon-to-be-occupied spaces. It’s space count has varied as it reconstructs current spaces for size.
“The occupancy rates are better than they had been,” said Bell, who added the mall was down to about 90 percent capacity at the trough of the recession. “They’ve been inching up as the recession has started to wear off.”
One space that’s vacant is one in the Howland Commons complex formerly occupied by Borders, which filed for bankruptcy and closed its Eastwood Mall location last month. It vacated nearly 25,000 square feet of space.
It’s book-store replace-ment, Books-A-Million, hasn’t yet filled a 10,300-square-foot space in the Dillard concourse. Rue 21 will occupy nearly 7,000 square feet come November.
The mall also is adding several seasonal stores, including Sports Jungle, Hickory Farms, Dog Tags, Glass Gallery, Go Calendars, Go Games/Go Toys, Personalized Ornaments, Pillow Pets and RC Toys, which all should be open by mid-November.
Those seasonal tenants, Bell said, generally stay through January to service customers with return needs, but lately, they’ve been hanging around a bit longer.
“In some of our mall locations, there was such demand that they just stayed in the mall,” Bell added.