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Shopping Centers Today -> April 2003
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COCOWALK BUILDER PLANS ANOTHER MIAMI PROJECT
BY IAN RITTER
Constructa US, which co-developed the famous CocoWalk with visionary developer Yaromir Steiner, is building another project in the Miami area.
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This time Constructa US, a subsidiary of French developer Constructa, is developing a $150 million mixed-use lifestyle center in Miami’s Brickell District, a downtown area that is dominated by office buildings, but also has considerable residential development under way. The center, called Mary Brickell Village, will include 360 apartments as well as 200,000 square feet of retail when it opens in the summer of 2004. An additional 3,215 apartments are under construction by other developers in the area, according to the Brickell Area Association, a civic group of residents and business people, which touts Mary Brickell Village on its Web site.
“I think the trend of people coming back to the downtown and having an environment they would like to live in and services with close proximity is what this project is all about,” said George Giebel, a senior vice president at Constructa US.
As such, Constructa US is not counting on drawing shoppers from other neighborhoods to make the center succeed.
“It’s serving the immediate community of Brickell,” Giebel said. “We’re not trying to draw from a large trade area.”
This is Constructa US’ third retail development. Constructa established its U.S. arm in Miami in 1985. Besides CocoWalk, which it opened in 1990, it built the 53,000-square-foot specialty retail center Ocean Steps in Miami Beach in 1997. The company has also developed hotels across the country, as well as office buildings in California and Texas, and condominium complexes in South Florida.
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| Mary Brickell Village, which will bring 200,000 square feet of retail to downtown Miami, is Constructa US’ third retail development. |
Mary Brickell Village will differ in that it will serve a professional clientele, versus the tourist and nightclub settings of those other retail projects, Giebel said. Brickell, named after William and Mary Brickell, the American pioneers who set up a trading post there in the 1870s, is underserved by retail, he said.
So far Constructa US has commitments for a new Publix supermarket and three restaurants: Oceanaire Seafood Room, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro and Redstone American Grill. The developer says it would also like to bring in a bookstore, a home decor retailer, upscale fashion shops and other stores. Most of the retailers it is pursuing for the project are locally owned and operated boutiques, Giebel said, though Starbucks Coffee has signed on to the project.
“We’re trying to put tenants in that are the trendsetters of today,” Giebel said.
The restaurants will cater to workers in neighboring office buildings for lunch and dinner business meetings, as well as to nearby residents.
There is a huge demand for groceries in Brickell. Publix has long operated a store there that local industry insiders say earns up to $2,000 per square foot, and it opened a second in the neighborhood in February. But that’s still not enough, said Maria Rodamis, a spokeswoman for Publix’s Miami division, though she wouldn’t disclose the sales per square foot of the older Brickell District store.
“While that store is very successful, there is heavy traffic that goes through,” she said. “Parking is sometimes an issue.”
Even with this third store going up in Mary Brickell Village, the company still sees growth potential for the area and would build yet another if land became available, Rodamis said.
Groceries are not the only items locals need, said Boris Kozolchyk, vice president of the retail group in the Grubb & Ellis Miami office.
“There is not a great amount of retail,” he said of the area. “What you have is an area which has grown, and it’s a high demographic.”
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| Constructa US is most famous for CocoWalk, the pioneering urban retail entertainment project it opened with Yaromir Steiner 13 years ago in metro Miami. |
With customers pouring in from offices and homes alike, retailers at Mary Brickell Village could bring in between $400 and $600 a square foot, Kozolchyk estimates. That local customer base insulates the project from the vicissitudes of the tourism industry, something that is hurting CocoWalk right now, he said.
But Beth Azor, president of Miami development firm Terranova Corp., isn’t so sure. She says that Mary Brickell Village will have trouble finding retail tenants that want to enter the district, even with the office buildings and the growing number of apartments.
“The boutique retailers look for more-significant traffic,” said Azor, who has a view of the Mary Brickell Village construction from her office window. “A jewelry store — I don’t know how they would survive.”
Tourists don’t frequent the area, and nearby office workers are not likely to shop, she said.
On the other hand, service retail, such as the Publix and a dry cleaning business, will succeed, she said, and so will the restaurants.
“I think the restaurants will do great because of the amount of professionals in the area who eat out a lot,” she said. The restaurants will also attract people going to see the Miami Heat professional basketball team play at nearby American Airlines Arena, Azor said.
But Giebel disagrees with Azor’s viewpoint on the retail demand in the area. Publix would not be building a third store in the neighborhood if there were no demand, he said, and Mary Brickell Village will generate its own consumer traffic.
“There’s so much demand for our project,” he said. “There’s really no center destination right now in Brickell.”
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