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Shopping Centers Today -> November 2002
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WESTFIELD SHOPPINGTOWN OPENS NEAR ST. LOUIS
By Ian Ritter
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| The opening of Westfield Shoppingtown West County prompted a party. Projected annual sales of $350 million are expected to be cause for further celebration. |
Westfield America Trust has completed a project unlike any it has done before: the rebuilding from the ground up of a shopping center.
While the company has bought properties in the past, it has never built one. The center, Westfield Shoppingtown West County, is located in the town of Des Peres, outside St. Louis, Mo. The old 563,621-square-foot center was completely razed, making way for a new 1.2 million-square-foot, $237 million project that opened in September after about 20 months of construction work.
But the market justified all the work, said company Vice Chairman Richard Green. And the center (formerly known as West County Center) was certainly due for an overhaul. West County Center, which Westfield bought in 1994, was built in 1969.
Since then the market surrounding the center has grown, and continues to do so, and area consumers have more choices as to where to go and shop, Green observed. The only option, he said, was to start over.
“[West County] just was underserving the market,” he said. “We knew that if we created the right environment, the people would come.”
Westfield is providing shoppers some strong incentives to come to the center, through its new retail mix. For instance, the center offers Missouri’s first Nordstrom and its first Galyan’s sporting goods store, and it has added several other retailers besides.
The center, which Westfield America acquired when it bought the shopping center portfolio of St. Louis-based CenterMark Properties, is one of six retail properties the company has in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Two others there, Shoppingtown South County and Shoppingtown Mid Rivers, were also part of the CenterMark deal. Westfield America employs this strategy of having several centers in one metropolitan area (which it calls “clustering”) also in San Diego, Los Angeles and other cities. The idea is to make a brand of the Shoppingtown name, which was created by Australian parent Westfield Holdings in its home country in the 1960s and introduced to the United States in 1998.
John C. Melaniphy III, an executive vice president of Chicago real estate consulting firm Melaniphy & Associates, agrees with Westfield America officials that the St. Louis market will support an expanded West County. In St. Louis, he said, shopping centers have experienced “retail leakage,” prompting consumers dissatisfied with local choices to travel to Chicago for their upscale shopping.
Now, West County’s Nordstrom and a new Lord & Taylor should help persuade them to do their shopping at home, he said.
Melaniphy predicts that West County will generate $350 million in sales in its first year of business. That would be more than double the roughly $141 million the center generated just before the renovation began, as calculated from Westfield America’s $250-per-square- foot figure for 2000.
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