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PLYMOUTH ROCKS

Home building feeds retail boom in historic, Mass., town

BY IAN RITTER

The world may know Plymouth, Mass., best as the Pilgrims’ final stop in 1620 after a long sea journey. But some retail real estate developers are looking beyond the town’s Mayflower roots to what they consider to be a promising retail market.

Developers say Plymouth’s real potential is in its residential growth and not merely its traditional function as a destination that more than 1 million tourists visit yearly to see the Pilgrims’ historical landing place.

Saxon Real Estate Partners is one such visionary firm. The Middleboro, Mass.–based developer persuaded Wal-Mart to open a Sam’s Club and a Supercenter at Colony Place, a 865,000-square-foot power and lifestyle hybrid center Saxon will open in Plymouth in 2008, says Gary Darman, a partner at Saxon.

“We didn’t have to drag anyone to Plymouth,” Darman said. “All we had to do was put the best site in front of them, and they took it.”

That’s because Plymouth, a town of 54,000 with Boston to the north and Cape Cod to the south, is growing.

Since 2000 about 350 single-family homes have been built there yearly, according to the nonprofit Plymouth Regional Economic Development Foundation. The organization expects that to leap to about 450 annually, beginning this year.

The town’s industrial park is at capacity now, and the organization is planning to build two more.

This growth may be taking place simply because there’s room for it. At 103 square miles, Plymouth is geographically the state’s largest municipality — and only 46 percent of it is developed. That’s true even after 10 new golf courses have opened there in as many years. The median family income is $61,666 a year.

Further, many are coming from Boston and Cape Cod because they are drawn by the lower housing prices. The average home in Plymouth costs about $280,000, compared with roughly $340,000 in Boston and $310,000 around Cape Cod. “The quality of life in Plymouth attracts a lot of people,” said Denis J. Hanks, the executive director of Plymouth Development Foundation’s.

Colony Place will be built as a streetscape, with tree-lined streets and large sidewalks, says Mary McCarthy, a vice president at Boston-based architecture firm Cubellis Associates, which is designing the center. A mix of tenants of the Williams-Sonoma, higher-end sort will join Wal-Mart, she says.

New England Development is another company that is placing bets on Plymouth’s people growth. This Newton-Mass. based developer is building The Shops at Long Pond, a 500,000-square-foot power center scheduled to open in the fall, about five miles southeast of Colony Place. BJ’s Wholesale Club and Kohl’s will anchor the Shops at Long Pond.

The firm has done other work in Plymouth, including three of the local golf courses and The Pinehills, a master-planned community of which it was a co-developer. Pinehills has about 30,000 square feet of retail, but New England Development and its partners have the permitting rights to raise that to 1.3 million square feet.

It isn’t so much the tourists that have drawn BJ’s interest in the Long Pond development, says Annunziata Sodano, a BJ’s spokeswoman. Rather, the Natick, Mass.–based chain is targeting the locals. “Our focus is on families and women shoppers,” she said. “Anything else would be a bonus.”

Of course, none of this means that Plymouth tourism isn’t good for retail. Most of the tourist destinations, such as the replica of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, are on the waterfront, by the downtown retail district, an area that only has a 3 percent vacancy rate, according to the Plymouth Development Foundation.

The nearly two-mile strip of downtown retail lies along state Route 3A, over which 12,000 vehicles travel daily. These stores, all of which are independent businesses, do not cater to tourists only, as do stores in similar small towns that depend on outside visitors, says Paul Cripps, managing director of Destination Plymouth, a nonprofit group that promotes local tourism.

“You name it, and it’s down here,” Cripps said. “If you need your shoes repaired, there’s a guy who does that. It’s not just ticky-tacky pencil sharpeners down here.”

The stores include apparel, antiques and pet supplies, as well as a wine shop. Many of them are upscale, Cripps says. “The Plymouth resident has become a higher economic category, and the shops have found out if they don’t keep up with that, they don’t survive.”

The new developments in Plymouth aren’t intimidating the downtown merchants, because business has picked up as the population has increased, says Marie Whiting, a spokeswoman for the Plymouth Center Commerce Committee, a group of downtown merchants. “There’s so much interest in downtown that there’s not a week that seems to go by when I don’t get calls from entrepreneurs looking for space,” said Whiting, whose family has owned Pilgrim’s Progress, a downtown clothing store, for 26 years. “There are always little places popping up.”

The area’s regional mall, The Pyramid Cos.’ Independence Mall, in Kingston, about five miles northwest of Plymouth, has also benefited from the growth. It replaced a J.C. Penney and a Bradlees with Best Buy, Linens ’n Things and Target. The Filene’s department store expanded, and one-third of the in-line tenants were replaced. All this work, completed about two years ago, has increased total mall sales by 60 percent to $400 per square foot, says Timothy J. Kelley, Pyramid’s director of asset management.

Pyramid also plans to add as many as six restaurants, and is near to closing more deals, says Kelley. “We see a phenomenal opportunity [in Plymouth],” he said. “There’s still a lot of room to grow.”