Largest Outlet Mall in Kansas to Close This Fall

Kansas City Star reports:

Olathe’s Great Mall of the Great Plains on Monday announced plans to close this fall, joining a list of other once mighty area shopping centers that have gone dark.

The Great Mall — at Interstate 35 and 151st Street — opened to great fanfare in mid-1997, attracting nearly 1 million visitors in its first month of operations. But the mall soon began to struggle and never recovered from the economic downturn, changes in customers’ shopping habits and other factors, said the current owners, the Great Olathe Center LLC, an entity of the Van Tuyl Group.

Overhead costs have continued to rise even as occupancy of the 786,000-square-foot mall has dropped to about 50 percent, with many of those tenants on month-to-month leases. Recent studies by Jeff Green Partners, retail real estate consultants, say the site can support only 200,000 to 250,000 square feet of retail, the owners said.

“We’re considering our options, but there is nothing definitive yet,” said Jeff Smith, vice president of asset management for VanTrust Real Estate, which manages the property. “We need to get it closed in order to take a look at what the future holds for that piece of ground.”

Retail square footage news.