A Whole New Mall Game for McCain - Arkansas Business

Parking Lot Lease Deals a Whole New Mall Game for McCain

by Kyle Massey on Monday, Sept. 10, 2018

“Most of those big mall parking fields were just too big even in the heyday of driving to the mall,” said Josh Brown of Haag Brown Commercial Real Estate & Development in Jonesboro, which handled the lease deal with Dillard’s for a 4,000-SF Tacos 4 Life. That project is under construction at 4211 Warden Road. “Two, you’ve got companies like Dillard’s that want to provide customer energy out there in their parking lots.”

“Big box retailers are using this type of development to create more of an experience for shoppers,” said Ken Vaughan, president of Purple Cow, which will have five outlets after the $2 million McCain site opens. “They’re making the mall more than a shopping site, more a destination to shop, dine and play. So there’s the benefit of leasing out some parking, but the bigger reason is to enhance customers’ overall experience.”

‘Massive’ Lots Not Needed

Doug Sesler, Macy’s executive vice president for real estate, took up the parking lot trend in an investor-day talk. “We’re all talking about driverless cars; we’re talking about the increased used of Uber,” he said. “The fact of the matter is we don’t need the massive parking lots that we needed in the 1970s.”

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“Purple Cow has been a local icon for many years, and we are excited to have them,” Meyer wrote in a statement to Arkansas Business. She praised Tacos 4 Life as another Arkansas company with tasty food and a special mission to fight global childhood hunger. (The company donates 22 cents to Feed My Starving Children for every taco, quesadilla, salad and rice bowl sold.)

Still Hot After 45 Years

“The malls where these parking field projects are coming up typically are in areas of really good real estate,” said Brown, the Jonesboro real estate executive. “If you look at the top 10 performing restaurants in Little Rock, you see many of them dotted around this property, and that’s the same in other cities doing this.” He said when malls were first developed, surrounding areas developed quickly, as a rule, leaving no space for restaurants and companies looking to break in. “It’s hard to do because nothing is available,” Brown said. “It’s my understanding that McCain Mall had only a couple of outparcels available. But we’re working these same types of transactions in multiple states on Dillard’s properties, J.C. Penney properties or in some instances Target outparcels.”

“We feel it’s a dynamic restaurant market there in North Little Rock, and specifically around McCain Mall. We ex-pect a lot of economic velocity, and think consumers from all over the area will come. There are many restaurant options right there, but the market seems to support it.”

A Tale of Two Projects

‘Best Restaurant Land’

“We’ll be doing more for Tacos 4 Life. We just opened a store in Fort Smith that’s done really well, and they opened stores in Rogers and in [Concord] North Carolina. These are generally more traditional outparcels or redevelopments of existing space, rather than space on an existing parking lot, but I’m sure there are others like that in our pipeline.”

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Arkansas Business

Monday, September 10, 2018