Rome committee votes to consider new TAD area
The mall property is included in the tax allocation district package, which could spur millions in investment in the mall and help build up the area around the new tennis center.
The mall is included in the tax district proposal, which could help build up the tennis center area.
Rome’s Redevelopment Committee has given city staff the green light to take the steps needed for creating a new tax allocation district on acreage around Mount Berry Mall.
John Mulherin — of Hull Property Group, which owns the mall — told the panel Thursday that the owners were willing to make additional investments in improving the mall property up front. In return they would receive a portion of their investments back from TAD financing.
“We do feel a sense of urgency to redevelop this property,” Mulherin said. He told the committee — City Commissioners Bill Collins, Evie McNiece and Bill Irmscher — that the American mall industry projects 300 to 400 regional malls will fail in the coming year.
“These are not in Atlanta, but in the secondary and tertiary markets,” Mulherin explained.
Irmscher turned to a report in Fortune Magazine that indicated as many as half of all malls across America would close in the next decade. He questioned Mulherin about the long-term viability of Mount Berry Mall.
Mulherin said Hull Property has a record of purchasing distressed malls, stabilizing them and repositioning them.
“We have a good track record and just bought nine more malls last year,” he said.
Hull is able to acquire properties at $0.30 to $0.40 on the dollar, Mulherin shared, allowing the company to make the improvements necessary to redevelop their properties.
“We’ve never sold a mall property,” Mulherin said. “We take the longterm approach to redevelopment.”
Commissioner Craig McDaniel attended the meeting and said that in the interest of advancing the Rome Tennis Center at Berry College, the city should do all it can to help the mall become viable once again.
Mulherin was not willing to discuss sales figures with the commissioners Thursday, but did
say the increased activity at the tennis center has helped the mall’s food court.
McDaniel said that if he was in town for tennis, he would not go downtown to eat or shop between matches but would hunt for what’s closest to the tennis center — and that is the mall.
According to Mulherin, current plans call for the mall to demolish 190,000 square feet of property at the Sears end of the mall, opening up four outparcels for potential restaurant development.
A wall has been constructed just past Victoria’s Secret to negate the perception of the high vacancy Craig McDaniel Doug Walker / Rome News-Tribune
rate in the mall. Hull’s executive told the committee there is a 39.7 percent vacancy rate across the entire mall and a 56.7 percent vacancy rate among small shop space inside the mall.
“If you get to 20 percent on either one of those numbers you’re in deadmall.com territory,” Mulherin said.
The problem arises when corporate executives get close to renewing a lease and start crunching numbers, Mulherin explained.
Even if their own store sales are good, they look at the mall vacancy rate and decide that’s a mall in decline and fail to renew their lease, he continued.
“We get asked all the time, ‘Who are you going to bring to the mall?’ We just want to hang on to the ones we’ve got,” Mulherin said.
The planned demolition would bring the vacancy rates down to 17 percent mall-wide and 40 percent among the small shop spaces, Hull’s representative shared.
“I think it would be in our best interest as a city to at least see what we could do,” Collins said.
TAD