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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2001
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AMERICAN BEAUTY
Sacramento’s Galleria at Roseville is blooming
By Maura K. Ammenheuser
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Galleria
at Roseville, featuring an outdoor wing with 15 restaurants,
is the first new regional mall to open in Sacramento in 20
years.
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Roseville, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento, was a small city of 28,000 souls just 13 years ago. Then came the 1990s Silicon Valley tech boom, and today Roseville houses 80,000 people — affluent, white-collar beneficiaries of a white-hot economy. And they’re “hungry for additional retail,” said Eric Almquist, general manager of Galleria at Roseville, the first new regional mall to open in the Sacramento area in at least 20 years.
The 1.1 million-square-foot Galleria, developed, owned and managed by Chicago-based Urban Shopping Centers, is marketing itself as the “filet mignon” of retail, and several of its 120 stores are new to the Sacramento area, including Restoration Hardware, The Children’s Place and Yankee Candle.
Between its Aug. 25 opening date and February the center had hosted 7 million visitors, according to Almquist.
“The community has reacted extremely positively; we’ve set a new benchmark in Sacramento’s retail market,” Almquist said. He wouldn’t reveal the center’s exact sales figures but said, “we’re trending at pro forma, which is in the high $300s per square foot.”
The mall’s most unusual feature is The Promenade, an outdoor “wing” with 15 restaurants, an oversized, bronze-clad fireplace and a 2,000-square-foot children’s play area. It also includes big-box retailers such as Borders Books and Copeland’s Sports. Crate & Barrel is expected to complete The Promenade’s roster, opening its first Sacramento area store this month.
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Outdoor retail is “the hot trend in shopping center design,” Almquist said (Cover story, SCT, May 2000). “We’ve taken retailers you usually see on outparcels and put them up close” to the center. And the fireplace should warm outdoor diners on chilly nights, giving them one less reason to leave.
The Promenade is “a place for people to come shop, relax and spend some time,” Almquist continued. It’s meant to offer “a full experience, besides just running in, shopping and leaving.”
It has generated lots of local buzz, said Julia Burrows, assistant to Roseville’s city manager, mostly because “people around here are desperate for restaurants.” And, she added, “as soon as that Crate & Barrel opens, it’ll be another event for the city and another draw for the mall.”
Galleria at Roseville already has powerful pull. Its primary trade area is Placer County, in which the population has jumped dramatically to 200,000 today, from 86,700 in 1998, said Eileen Bohen, CMD, the center’s marketing manager. Roseville lies about 20 miles northeast of downtown Sacramento, and is near an unincorporated area dotted with million-dollar estates, Burrows said. The mall also draws people from as far west as Davis, Calif., 28 miles away on the far side of Sacramento. But on weekends Galleria even attracts shoppers from Lake Tahoe and Reno, Nev., 70 and 95 miles away, respectively, across the Sierra Nevada mountains.
As the newest big mall in the Sacramento area, Galleria at Roseville has some older centers in the market worried, though it’s unclear how much sales levels have eroded and to what extent they will be able to stabilize revenues when Galleria’s novelty wears off.
Arden Fair, a 1.1 million-square-foot center about 19 miles away, is taking the most public steps to maintain market share, beginning a renovation expected to wrap up this summer, said Chris Facas, general manager. Managed by The Macerich Co., the mall is launching a multimillion-dollar “facelift,” he said. Changes will include new seating areas, rest rooms, landscaping, parking improvements and a general “sprucing up of the interior.” The mall expects the city of Sacramento to improve surrounding streets and intersections to ease traffic flow into the center, too.
Arden Fair is “the dominant retail facility in the Sacramento area,” Facas said. Its anchors and Galleria’s are identical, and they share many of the same retailers.
“There’s definitely a battle zone where we’re competing for the same shoppers,” but their markets overlap rather than completely coincide, Facas said. Arden Fair serves a more urban, ethnically and economically diverse population, he said. Long-term, Arden Fair and Galleria at Roseville will “pretty well coexist,” Facas said.
But short-term, Arden Fair’s sales were hurt by Galleria’s opening, though Facas wouldn’t reveal exact figures.
“We definitely took a hit,” he said. “Our sales dropped off,” bottoming out in November, but they rebounded a bit in December and January. Facas said he thinks they’ll stabilize at a healthy level.
Galleria helped prompt the establishment of Sunrise Marketplace, a 10-block special tax district created last year in Citrus Heights, a city next to Roseville, said Kathilynn Carpenter, the tax district’s executive director. It was formed to better market its 550 members, mostly retailers and community shopping centers anchored by national chain stores, in the face of growing competition, especially from Galleria, she said.
The district’s members include Sunrise Mall, the closest large center to Galleria, about seven miles away.
Sunrise Mall’s management, James J. Cordano Co., declined comment. But Carpenter said that district businesses experienced less sales impact from Galleria than they’d expected in late 1999, just before Sunrise Marketplace officially formed.
At press time, sales figures weren’t available for the district’s first year. But Carpenter speculated that Galleria won’t have an impact on the 150,000-square-foot community centers that populate her district; big-box retailers popping up throughout Sacramento are a greater threat, she said.
Another player in the market is Westfield Shoppingtown Downtown, a 1.1 million-square-foot, 113-shop center anchored by two Macy’s. Catering to the tourists and downtown’s office workers, the center had sales of $331 per square foot in 1999, according to Westfield America Inc.’s Web site. The mall’s manager did not return calls seeking comment on Galleria.
To underline his point, Galleria at Roseville won’t be the new kid on the block for very long: More major malls are in the works nearby. General Growth Properties is planning Lent Ranch Marketplace, which is expected to offer at least 1 million square feet of retail when it opens in the fall of 2003 in Elk Grove, about 15 miles south of Sacramento. According to Facas, there’s at least one other major project on the horizon, too.
That doesn’t scare the folks at Galleria at Roseville, though.
“We haven’t talked about it much at all,” Almquist said. “Certainly this is a growing market. If another mall comes in, it would be fine with us. It’s part of the business ... we’ve got a great product, and we’re open. We have a pretty strong market for years to come.”
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