by CSB Staff •
August 3, 2018 •
News •
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Image of Clearview Mall via Google Maps
The family that has owned the Clearview Shopping Center for decades, the Richards, announced yesterday that they purchased the adjacent Sears Roebuck property.
The nearly 14 acre Sears site is contiguous to the shopping center and boasts 200,000 square feet of retail space fronting Veterans Blvd.
With Sears closing stores around the nation, the Sears site had been quietly marketed for over a year. Kirsten Early and Stephanie Hilferty of SRSA Commercial Real Estate, Inc. represented Sears in the sale, and sources tell CSB that they were instrumental in getting the deal with the Richards family closed.
Sears will continue to operate in its current space, while eventually downsizing to a smaller footprint within the building. This will be the first step in a multi-phase redevelopment of the mall, which will eventually include the development of at least two out-parcels along Veterans Memorial Blvd. This highly-trafficked site sees more than 50,000 vehicles each day on Veterans Memorial Boulevard and 180,000 vehicles each day along Interstate 10, and is one of the key large scale redevelopment sites in the metro area.
“Over the past 50 years, our family has maintained a commitment to the greater New Orleans area that in many ways runs counter to what we have seen in communities across the U.S., where malls and shopping centers like ours have shifted to non-local operations,” said managing partner Thomas Richards. “Our acquisition of the Sears site represents the first step in our vision of unlocking the site’s full potential, re-positioning and re-imagining Clearview in a way that has never been possible since Sears and Clearview co-developed the site back in 1968. It is important to the family to maximize the potential of this incredibly attractive site, while keeping it under local operation and control.”
Kirsten Early, Director of Retail for SRSA Commercial Real Estate, has also been retained by the Richards family to further the ongoing development of Clearview Shopping Center. The shopping center now boasts over 750,000 square feet.