Box Store Mania is Coming Soon

[HauntedMemphis]

A few years ago the Circuit City here closed...and STILL sits empty. The landlord is STILL asking for a lease of $37,550 a MONTH!!! ...and has NO plans of coming down on that price. No wonder this businesses are going under. Unless building owners realize that they cannot keep their leases as high as they are and they don't come down on price, the won't have anybody lease.

HOWEVER...here we have a complete mall that sits totally empty. Massive parking lot...over 100,000 sq. ft. of space...great location...but he won't open leases to anyone. Why? Because the tax write-off he gets from the building sitting empty creates a return that makes him MORE money than it would if it were completely leased out. I call BULLSHIT! Ugh...rant over. -Tyler

Now, this we do have in Memphis as well. We have a number of dead malls in the area. We also had Schnukks (grocery store chain) leave Memphis, leaving a large number of empty grocery stores. (And that's after Piggly Wiggly had abandoned stores sitting empty the last 5 years already.)

We are seeing some empty places get leveled to put up CVS pharmacies in the area though. They are doing a pretty massive expansion, but it won't hardly put a dent in the empty storefronts around here. Whole stripmalls and malls sit empty.

[drfrightner]

Trust me on this... if all those Best Buys go empty along with all these other major box stores, prices for that space will drop like a rock. It won't be what you think, it will be a whole lot cheaper than Best Buy paid. Price is based on national, regional amount of feet open... a national chain looks at not local but national because they are national. If space is open everywhere the price will be cheaper. Additionally traditionally retail space owners give tons of money to people who sign long term leases so you can change the building per your requirements. If you require no investment into the space then you can get a whole lot less lease.

I'm actually thinking a lot more haunts might open. Lastly for those of you who said we can't afford such a space then explain why every single empty box space that is leased by these Halloween stores????? C'mon yeah you can rent them.

Larry

[mindtumor]

I guess we will see what happens. As far as the halloween retailers, it seems like the ones right by me have been occupying smaller and smaller spaces vs the larger ones they used too. But that could just be in my immediate area. Things are worse here than most places right now though so it may be a bad example. Other states/cities are probably doing better than our current state economy.

I could, however, see a lot of those empty Block Buster buildings getting snatched up. Those are decent size for an average sized haunt and depending on the building owner you can get a decent deal for them. In my personal experience I could a space like that for the first 3 years we ran. The owner was more than willing to give it to us temp. Plus, another year we had a owner desperately trying to rent us a old blockbuster type space. One piece of advice though, try and find the actual owner of the building vs going through the listing company.