Mall co-owner buys retail center
A co-owner of the former East Hills mall property in northeast Bakersfield has purchased a much smaller shopping center nearby that’s fully leased with tenants including OfficeMax and T-Mobile.
Investors who had owned the center for years closed on the sale Friday of 29,387 square feet of property at 2625-2635 Mall View Road to ZDI Inc., headed by investor Stephen Zimmerman.
The purchase price was listed as $8.1 million, which is about $900,000 more than ZDI and its partners paid for the long-vacant 350,500-square-foot retail center also located along Mall View Road.
The sellers were represented by Cushman & Wakefield brokers Duane Keathley and Vincent Roche, who said Wednesday ZDI chose to buy the center because of an unrelated sale that made another purchase financially advantageous.
Roche noted that although last week’s purchase “stood on its own merits as a good investment,” it’s likely that improvements on the former East Hills Mall property will spill over to the smaller property.
“Where there is (shopper) demand like that, it will only enhance the investment he (Zimmerman) has made,” Roche said.
The retail center in the transaction announced Wednesday was built in 2005. It does not include a nearby car wash or freestanding restaurant tenants El Pollo Loco or Panda Express.
Demolition work has been done at the former East Hills Mall but no construction has begun, in part because of recently high costs, Roche said. He added that a redeveloped mall is expected to open at the site in the first half of 2025 “if all things go well.”
The idea at this point is not to proceed with an earlier plan for mixed-use redevelopment that would have included housing. Instead, Roche said the idea now is to fill the entire 36-acre site with retail.
“Right now, it looks like it would be all retail,” he said. “And it would be other retailers that are here in town that don’t yet have locations in the northeast part of town.”