PLANO -- A couple of the quickest reactions to H-E-B building supermarkets in Dallas-Fort Worth have come not from grocery stores but from a department store and a shopping center.
Kohl’s is building a store right next to one of its existing stores in West Plano — and the new one faces the H-E-B store under construction on the southwest corner of Preston Road and Spring Creek Parkway.
The new Kohl’s will open this fall about the same time H-E-B does, giving the Wisconsin-based department store a lot more visibility to potential shoppers than at its current location.
Kohl’s existing store at 4708 W. Spring Creek Parkway faces Ohio Drive and is in a spot that exemplifies the retailer’s long strategy of nestling into neighborhoods and shunning regional malls. But the move is perhaps a correction. You can’t see that Kohl’s from Preston Road, which is considered prime real estate from Highland Park through Dallas, Richardson, Plano and more recently, Prosper.
Separately, a shopping center just south of the Plano H-E-B has a new owner, new tenants and is getting a makeover.
Houston-based Whitestone REIT bought the 163,000-square-foot Lakeside Market last summer and noted in its announcement that the property was advantageously located just south of H-E-B’s future Plano store. Whitestone’s most recent financial reports show that occupancy at the center anchored by Weir’s Furniture Village is up to 84% from 80% a year ago.
Chris Muncy, Whitestone’s leasing agent for Lakeside Market, said some exterior improvements are underway, including paint and new directional signs. The shopping center has access into the H-E-B parking lot, and “we anticipate extra traffic through our center,” he said.
That West Plano Kohl’s is one of the original 17 stores the discount department store chain opened in Dallas-Fort Worth in 1999 and 2000. It was a big Texas entrance for Kohl’s in competitor JCPenney’s headquarters market.
The existing Kohl’s store will close when the new one opens this fall.
Kohl’s is building new stores that are smaller, and the new one in West Plano will be 55,000 square feet, almost half the size of most of its 1,100 stores.
The Kohl’s store was built on the west side of a 9-acre parcel that’s owned by Dallas-based Fritz Duda Co. and is now branded as Promontory on Preston. So far, the only other building facing Preston Road along with the new Kohl’s is a Chase bank branch. But the developer says that there’s space on Preston for buildings totaling more than 440,000 square feet for retail, restaurants and services.
A partnership between Fritz Duda and Dallas-based Columbus Realty Trust plans to tear down the existing Kohl’s and build 264 apartments. The city of Plano approved those plans in July 2020, a few months before H-E-B said publicly that it was ready to move ahead with its D-FW expansion. But it was well known that H-E-B had owned the opposite corner since 2012.
“We’re very happy about the timing with H-E-B,” said Andrew Doughtie, Duda’s chief operating officer. The residential and retail will be joined and surrounded by walkable park settings, he said, and the corner of Preston and Spring Creek is being designed for restaurants.
H-E-B says its Plano and Frisco stores, each about 110,000 square feet, will open this fall. Two more under construction in McKinney and Allen are scheduled to open next summer.
Most potential retail tenants understand the advantage of having an H-E-B next door, but Lakeside Market’s Muncy said he’s had to explain H-E-B’s popularity to some out-of-state businesses.
“I tell them that people from all over D-FW will come to Plano to this H-E-B,” he said, and that “all of a sudden the dirt started flying across the street” for the new Kohl’s store.
Twitter: @MariaHalkias
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