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Shopping Centers Today -> September 2003
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PROJECT ENDS RETAIL FAMINE IN SALT LAKE SUBURB
BY IAN RITTER
West Jordan looked like the suburb that retailers forgot. Lying 14 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, it had next to nothing in the way of stores. But Carlsbad, Calif.-based Russell W. Grosse Development Co. is quickly changing that, as construction progresses on a more than 1.4 million-square-foot open-air center that is part of a 500-acre mixed-use project.
The city now boasts such high-profile big-box tenants as Barnes & Noble, Lowe’s, OfficeMax, Old Navy, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart, and this fall Sears is set to complete its first stand-alone store there, Sears Grand.
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Jordan Landing, as the project is called, has unfolded in phases since 1999. The retail component, called Jordan Landing Shopping Center, will be Utah’s largest shopping area when it is completed in the first quarter of next year, the developer says.
Besides the retail, Jordan Landing has 400,000 square feet of office space, 400,000 square feet of industrial development and, most important, 1,100 housing units, with an additional 800 in line.
What the housing brings is a built-in customer base in a growing area, says Jeff Vitek, newly named president of Grosse Development, who formerly leased much of the project as a CB Richard Ellis broker.
“This is the only quadrant [of the Salt Lake City metro area] where the growth was going to go,” he said, noting the area has been neglected by developers.
In 1997 Grosse Development started buying property in West Jordan. The first tenant was a 24-screen, 5,000-seat Cinemark Theatre in 1999. It took awhile before other retailers committed to the project, because of the lack of a major retail anchor, says John Owens, a land, investment and retail specialist at Colliers Commerce CRG, Salt Lake City, who represented Wal-Mart at Jordan Landing.
“It was limping along for a while, until Wal-Mart kicked in,” Owens said. Wal-Mart opened in 2001 and then “everything kind of came together,” said Owens.
The Sears concept will be the first of five stand-alone pilot stores the company will test, says Linda Blakely, a company spokeswoman. “We chose Salt Lake City because we knew we wanted to test a store where we could expand to a mass of young families,” she said.
In the first quarter Bed Bath & Beyond, Pier 1 Imports, a Wild Oats Natural Marketplace grocery store and others will open in what Vitek calls a “lifestyle phase” of the center. Grosse Development is also in negotiations with Kohl’s; if that deal goes through, all of the center’s space will be filled. And so will West Jordan’s appetite for retail.
“The southwest quadrant of Salt Lake City was devoid of services,” Vitek said. “We are very fortunate to have found it.”
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