A Different Kind Of Mall Sale

The death spiral for malls in the U.S. continues. Ever since online buying took root it was inevitable that expensive to inhabit, own  and run shopping malls would fall out of fashion. Very few malls are built in the U.S. now, and m any of them are sparsely attended by shoppers, who prefer the click and buy procedure of online purchases. With more retail sellers having trouble making profit  and shuttering their stores across the U.S., some mall property owners and managers are trying to unload weak malls at a faster pace.
Irony of irony! The quickest and easiest way to do that, it turns out, is to sell their malls online.
The Wall Street Journal has reported on this phenomenon and one sale example is typical. In July, Midway Mall in Elyria, Ohio, was sold for $4.5 million by an online auction hosted by online real estate transaction marketplace. A privately owned real estate investment and management firm named Namdar Realty Group purchased the single story, 585,606-square-foot mall for $8 a square foot, according to data from Real Capital Analytics. The mall, built in 1965, was foreclosed on last year. It's a great price for a building of that size. No doubt some corporation will scoop up the mall and use it as a head quarter for their business.

Online auctions for properties like malls have evolved over the past five years. They have become more mainstream. In 2015 a total of 38 malls were closed and sold online. In 2016 it was a total of 68 malls were sold. What happens to the malls when sold? The answer is just about everything. Some become corporate offices, others change shopping areas into something that are based on a specific purpose, food for example. Where previously a mall was for shopping and food was to support customers' ability to stay in the mall longer, by turning that idea on its head, food selling is all those malls do now.

Others change their physical attractiveness, making stores inside face outward to the street with doors. That's supposed to make the former mall more fuzzy and attractive to shoppers in order to attract ore of them. The most radical mall makeover is to tear the down and build a city like environment that includes streets, stores and apartments. The shopping is built around the residents apartments who live there. In the end, the internet is killing another cultural habit, shopping at a mall. For we male anti shoppers, it's not a tragic death.