The Newest Mall Rats: DMVs, Libraries

July 4, 2008 — -- Community college classes in the old mall movie theater. A DMV office across from the Starbucks. Maybe a local library between the Victoria's Secret and the Gap.

Mall and strip center owners are turning to untried and untraditional tenants to brighten dark storefronts as the sluggish economy sends more retailers to bankruptcy or forces others to scale back their expansion plans.

Retail vacancies nationwide hover around 10 percent, according to ReStore, the retail division of commercial real estate services firm NAI Global, and could reach 12 percent or more by end of the year. Similarly, Property & Portfolio Research expects vacancies to rise and the total amount of new space leased to drop 94 percent from 2007.

Some of the hardest-hit areas will be the same ones battling the worst declines in housing prices: Southern California, Florida, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Retailers followed the new rooftops there, but are now finding fewer people are living in those houses than expected.

"A lot of the stores that opened in growing communities are definitely feeling the pain today," said David Solomon, president of NAI ReStore. "These guys were paying top-of-the-market rents based on projections that the sky wouldn't fall. They're seeing the hangover effects of that now."

But retail owners and their leasing teams aren't hanging up their hats just yet.

"What we do in these times, we look for nontraditional uses to fill spaces and to generate income and, more importantly, traffic to help existing retailers to produce more sales," said John Bemis, head of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.'s retail leasing team.

Bemis said it's typical to turn to the public sector, such as colleges or city and state services, as tenants. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a great tenant for a mall or strip center, Bemis said, because people are constantly coming in and out of the government office.

In November, mall owner Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust snagged New River Community College as a tenant for a former theater space in its New River Valley Mall in Christianburg, Va. The satellite location features seven classrooms, four computer labs, a science lab, two auditoriums, testing and conference rooms and office space.