Real Estate

In 2000, the population of Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, was under 40,000. Today, the city named the fastest-growing in America (per U.S. Census Bureau) counts more than 80,000 citizens and newcomers are spilling over into neighboring communities.  

Two Hispanic supermarket chains are merging with an eye to extending their footprint beyond their home base.    Private equity firm KKR announced it is combining Cardenas Markets and Mi Pueblo, which KKR (and Victory Park Capital) acquired at the end of last year. The combined business will operate as Cardenas Markets LLC and will become one of the largest Hispanic supermarket chains in the country.   

Organic Garage has opened an urban-inspired flagship that takes its design cues from the industrial surroundings and city streetscapes of its locale. Located in Toronto’s west-end Junction neighborhood, the 15,000-sq.-ft. grocery store incorporates murals and graffiti, street signs, pavement markings, guardrails, street lights, and building signs. To add to the authenticity, a local graffiti artist painted over brick walls giving a vibrant and urban feel to the space.  

Sears Holdings continues to shrink its traditional store portfolio even as it plans to open more smaller, specialty stores.   The embattled retailer on Friday announced that it will close 43 more locations -- eight Sears stores and 35 Kmart locations -- by early October. This is on top of the 265 store closings that it has already announced for this year.   

Nordstrom will be erecting its second off-price Nordstrom Rack store in Milwaukee. The Seattle-based retailer has announced plans for a 26,800-sq.-ft. location at the Bayshore Town Center in the city’s North Shore.   The Nordstrom Rack will be erected on the site of a vacated Sears at the Olshan Properties center, where a Total Wine & More store is also slated to take up some of the space.  

The town managers of New Lenox, Illinois, needed a new train station, so they bought a shopping center.   It was three years ago that Mayor Tim Baldermann and New Lenox purchased the Rock Island Station Shopping Center, according to the Chicago Tribune.  It invested more than $3 million in the site, which included buying out the businesses of the four stores there, demolishing them, and doing an environmental clean-up.    

“Ridgmar…has always had a good regional location, and that’s not something to give up on,” Weitzman broker Bob Young told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.     A fixture in the central Texas city since the 1970s, Ridgmar Mall is is replacing shuttered Neiman Marcus and Macy anchors with a SeaQuest Aquarium in an attempt to escape the fate of two other malls that have closed in Tarrant County: North Hills Mall in North Richland Hills and Six Flags Mall in Arlington.  

Muji, the Tokyo-based global retailer, will open its largest store to date — underneath its very own hotel.      The company will open a hotel in in Tokyo's Ginza district in spring 2019. The hotel will be located in a new, 10-story building that will also house a 35,000-sq.-ft. Muji flagship. The store will occupy one basement floor up to part of the sixth floor above ground, with the rest of the space above devoted to the hotel, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.