Texas developer buys vacant Macy's store for $3 million
A Texas development company Friday acquired the vacant Macy’s department store in The Citadel mall with plans to lease the two-story building to another retailer, according to the real estate agent who handled the deal.
ICA Properties Inc. of Odessa paid $3 million to Cincinnati-based Macy’s for the 185,000-square-foot former department store on the west end of the mall that closed last year, said Mike Helwege, a partner in Bach Real Estate Partners LLC, which had listed the property for sale early this year. Macy’s continues to operate a store at Chapel Hills Mall in northern Colorado Springs.
ICA is “diligently working to find the perfect match for the building and hopes to either land a tenant or be in serious discussions with one by year’s end,” said Tom Glasman, an asset manager for ICA in Odessa.
ICA owns more than 2 million square feet of office buildings, shopping centers and hotels, including the Music City Mall, a lifestyle center, two other smaller shopping centers and eight office buildings, all in Odessa, and seven hotels in New Mexico and Texas under the MCM Elegante and MCM Grande names. The company also owns vacant land on the north edge of Pueblo and in Texas as well as a television station and five radio stations in Odessa.
The deal comes about two weeks after Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties LLC took over management of The Citadel, the city’s oldest regional shopping mall, from a partnership controlled by Arkansas-based Midwest Mall Properties LLC. Urban Retail Properties manages 41 other malls and shopping centers in 18 states.
Officials from Urban Retail Properties and Midwest Mall Properties did not return telephone calls in recent days seeking comment on the management change, but Urban Retail Properties reportedly retained all of The Citadel’s 18 employees.
An investment trust that loaned the Midwest partnership $290 million in 2007 to buy The Citadel and another mall in Arkansas is pursuing either foreclosure of the loan or appointment of a receiver after the trust rejected Midwest’s request to restructure the loan and after Midwest rejected the trust’s workout proposals, according to a bulletin published last month by Realpoint, a credit reporting agency owned by Morningstar Inc.
