DMM Retail Industry e-News Issue #218

Retail, Condo, Office Project Looks to Lure Business, Tourists to Queens, NY

In an attempt to lure tourists from Asia away from Manhattan and into one of New York City’s other boroughs, F&T Group and SGC America are gearing up for the February 2022 opening of their $800 million 1.2 million-square-foot Tangram complex in Flushing, Queens (home of the city’s other baseball team, the New York Mets). Citing a recent Wall Street Journal article, The Real Deal reported the project features an 85,000-square-foot office condominium, restaurants and retail outlets popular in China and Japan, a 4D multiplex theater, 132 residential condos with various “amenities including a heated indoor lap pool and an interior garden with cherry trees,” and a 208-room Renaissance Hotel.

CO Sears Cleared for Apts, and More! And Creating a New Neighborhood in Indy

“Booming” is a word that we, here at DMM/ShoppingCenters.com, generally love to see in news articles. As in “Colorado Springs is booming.” That was the first sentence of a recent article in The Colorado Springs Gazette, which updated readers on several projects. Among them, Evergreen Devco’s plan to replace the former Sears at the Chapel Hills Mall with a 300-unit apartment project, and that’s expected to open in 2023. “I certainly hope that everyone’s pleased with the product we’re putting up there. I really feel like it’s going to rejuvenate a lot of the other retailers at the (mall),” said Robert Place, Evergreen Devco’s multifamily development director. Meanwhile, over in Indianapolis, Fox59 reported recently that Sojos Capital will be turning the Lafayette Square Mall and some nearby properties into a new neighborhood called Window to the World. “I think the uniqueness of it will make an attractive place for everybody in the city to come,” Sojos Capital Principal Fabio De La Cruz told Fox59. The project includes 200 multi-family rental units, a boutique hotel, office space, multi-functional event space, trampoline park, soccer fields, and a “transformation of the current mall interior into year-round indoor ‘streets’ that recreate outdoor scenes from around the world.”

Looking Ahead – Forrester’s Five Retail Trends for ’22

2020 was hard enough, and 2021 saw a nice rebound, but what lies ahead for retail in 2022? The folks at Forrester came out with a new report recently, “Predictions 2022: Retail.” According to a recent article by Chain Store Age’s Dan Berthiaume, Senior Editor, Technology, among their top five predictions, that the next retail service differentiator will be returns (“retailers and brands will invest to upgrade returns — locations, streamlined processes, refund issuance, internal returns processing”) and that we’ll see more “unlikely” partnerships for store-within-store initiatives. “Partnering with another retailer expands the footprint in often prime locations minus the expense of another full store. For the host retailer, it refreshes assortments, grows overall per-square-foot sales, and lowers financial exposure.”