For the first time in 21 years, Plano’s Shops at Willow Bend has local owners.
Centennial, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm, has purchased the Plano mall with investors Dallas-based Cawley Partners and New York-based Waterfall Asset Management.
The transaction, which closed Wednesday, also includes Fairlane Town Center, a suburban Detroit mall. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed.
Willow Bend’s two previous owners struggled to attract customers and tenants, but Steve Levin, the founder and CEO of Centennial, is promising a transformation.
Centennial plans to immediately complete construction of the center’s movie theater, which was abandoned during the pandemic, and Levin said the new owners will begin planning for the mall’s future as a mixed-use redevelopment.
“We believe the best real estate is where suburban malls like The Shops at Willow Bend sit today,” Leven said. Centennial’s experience with similar properties in other cities gives it “a proven playbook for how to transform these complicated assets into tomorrow’s most relevant and dominant mixed-use destinations.”
Whitney Livingston, Centennial’s president and chief operating officer, said Willow Bend “was too big the day it opened.”
The mall has 520,000 square feet of space for small stores between the larger anchors, and that is too much, she said. “A big part of the challenge today is that yesterday’s mall developers thought they could do the same thing in every market.
“We think there are endless possibilities for Willow Bend,” Livingston said. “We need to go on a listening tour and form opinions from there.” The new owners will also need to seek city approvals for some changes.
Willow Bend was developed by Taubman Centers in 2001 and was the last enclosed mall to be built in Texas. It sits in upscale West Plano at the city’s southern border on the northwest corner of West Park Boulevard and the Dallas North Tollway.
Development leapfrogged Willow Bend, bringing in new competition. Just four miles up the tollway is Legacy West, a 5-year-old, $3 billion project with shopping and restaurants. The Star, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ development, is another four miles up the tollway. Frisco’s Stonebriar, just 7 miles away, opened a year before Willow Bend and has always been the more popular mall as housing developments exploded in Frisco.
Willow Bend’s past two owners made several big investments but none of the changes caught on enough to bring in shoppers, leaving the aesthetically beautiful mall a conundrum.
Local ownership may finally be the ticket for Willow Bend.
Bill Cawley, founder of Cawley Partners, has developed more than 12 million square feet of North Texas office space. Cawley has been active along the Dallas North Tollway in recent years in Frisco and Plano and in other suburbs, including Southlake and McKinney.
Levin founded Centennial in 1997 and has been redeveloping shopping center properties for years from Dallas, which is his hometown. The company owns nine open air centers and 12 malls in nine states, including Brazos Mall in Lake Jackson.
Livingston lives just north of the mall in Frisco and has shopped there for 12 years, taking her young children to the Crayola Experience and other kid-friendly areas there.
Willow Bend has been for sale for some time.
The 1.4-million-square-foot, two-level mall has been controlled by lenders since 2020, when former owner Starwood Retail couldn’t refinance a $137.5 million loan that came due in 2019. Willow Bend and two other malls that included Fairlane Town Center secured the loan. Willow Bend’s unpaid balance was $65.7 million. The Collin County Appraisal District last valued the property for tax purposes in 2021 at $107 million, down 22% from the prior year.
While the mall’s occupancy is well below 70%, it still has what are considered plum retail tenants, including Neiman Marcus, Dillard’s, Macy’s, Crate & Barrel, Vineyard Vines, H&M, Equinox fitness club, the Crayola Experience and the North Texas Performing Arts Center.
The shopping center has had another round of store closings in recent months. Ascension Coffee left, and Anthropologie moved to Stonebriar.
Asked about additional pending departures, Livingston said the sale doesn’t trigger lease changes. “We’ve had very positive conversations, and we have great relationships with the anchors.”
Livingston said Willow Bend’s location and its list of desirable tenants “lay a foundation and position the center well for future growth,” adding that the mall’s home furnishing stores have a strong business and it already appeals to young families.
Willow Bend is similar to Hawthorn Mall, a current redevelopment of Centennial’s located in the upscale Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills. That market doesn’t need office space, it needs multi-family housing, Livingston said. The company is working in phases and so far has demolished a vacant Sears and the corridor of small stores leading to it to make room for an open plaza area. It is creating uses for the mall’s huge parking garages by adding senior independent living and other apartments.
MainPlace Mall in Santa Ana, Calif., is another of the company’s major redevelopments. The mall was built in 1987 and the company is in the process of adding apartments, a grocery store, a European food hall and an outdoor concert venue.
Willow Bend has lots of undeveloped surface parking around the mall and 4,200 parking spaces in three parking garages that sit empty most of the time. “Those are very expensive to build now,” Livingston said.
Instead of bringing in an apartment builder to plop a complex on one end of the property, Centennial develops all the parts of a new mixed-use project.
“It has to be holistically master-planned,” she said. “As a mall redeveloper, that’s what differentiates us. We have the expertise to make the right decisions for the long term.”
Late last year, Centennial bought Westland Mall, a regional center in Hialeah, Fla., just outside Miami, and is in the process of making redevelopment plans there, too. The pandemic has accelerated the decline of already weak malls, and experts believe as many a fourth of the 1,000 malls in the U.S. will close over the next three to five years.
The redevelopments aren’t cookie-cutter plans but build on the needs for each community, Livingston said. “The main executing strategy is different for Hawthorne and MainPlace and will be different for Willow Bend.”
Note: Story was updated Wednesday afternoon after the deal closed.
Twitter: @MariaHalkias
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