LITTLE ROCK — The Promenade at Chenal shopping center is getting back on track after the economic recession set its progress back about 18 months, its developer says, as a frozen national retail expansion begins to thaw.
The “lifestyle center” lists 25 stores open there, including the IMAX movie theater.
RED Development LLC, developer of the Promenade at Chenal, has said in the past that it projected about 40 tenants there.
Dave Claflin, a spokesman for RED, said Wednesday that the number of available slots for stores can change depending on tenants’ space needs. He said he could not provide the average store size in the 340,000-square-foot center.
Claflin said the recession made it all but impossible to attract national retail chains, some of which in a year’s time might have added 60 or more locations. Instead they opened just a handful or none at all.
The recession began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. As the economy recovers, centers such as the Promenade, which opened in 2008, are well-positioned to take advantage of it, industry ob-servers say.
Several stores have opened this year in the Little Rock center, including Anthropologie, Muse, EcoFab, Charming Charlie, Flirt, Bravo Cucina Italiana restaurant and Paul’s Shoes.
A wine bar is to open at the Promenade next month, and a White House Black Market store will open in February, Claflin said. He also said the center is making progress with several national retail chains, but he would not provide details.
The impact of the recession has been mixed for other lifestyle shopping centers developed in Little Rock during the early part of the decade. Lifestyle centers are usually open-air shopping centers laid out with “traditional streetscapes” that incorporate retail and restaurant components catering to higher-income customers, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.
The Park Avenue shopping center on University Avenue in Little Rock is planned as a mixed-use center with space for a big-box retailer, a movie theater and a bookstore, as well as residential and office space. So far, only one bigbox retailer, Target, has materialized. Its store opened last month.
The Pleasant Ridge Town Center, on the other hand, is 94 percent occupied, according to developer Lou Schickel. The center is anchored by a Belk department store and The Fresh Market grocery store, and has a mix of other local, regional and national stores.
“I don’t think you have a recession in Little Rock, to tell you the truth. And you surely don’t have it in west Little Rock,” Schickel said.
Hank Kelley, of Flake & Kelley Commercial, said his company is working with several retailers looking to open stores in Little Rock next year. Kelley helps retailers find homes as part of the ChainLinks Retail Advisors Network.
He said the lifestyle centers built before the recession will help bring retailers to Little Rock as expansion picks up, and existing developments will benefit from the slow pace of new building in recent years.
“Even though it may have been a rough time for those developers during the periods when they didn’t lease up as fast as they wanted, they’ve got well-located properties, and those properties will perform well over the next 10 years,” he said.
Jesse Tron, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said vacancy rates at shopping centers around the country have stabilized, and some retailers are making tentative steps toward expansion.
“We’re not fully there yet, we’re not back yet all the way, but things are starting to trend in the right direction,” Tron said. He noted that food chains, children’s clothing stores, and clothing retailers such as Zara and Forever 21 are among those expanding.
Retail sales rose by 1.2 percent in October, the fourth straight month of increasing sales, according to a Commerce Department report released this week.
Economists are also optimistic that the coming Christmas shopping season will give retailers a boost. The National Retail Federation forecasts a sales increase of 2.3 percent to $447.1 billion during the season, which begins the day after Thanksgiving. Last year sales increased 0.4 percent during the holidays, and sales fell 3.9 percent during the 2008 holiday season.
But Tron said the way forward for shopping centers is not entirely clear. While lifestyle centers once looked exclusively for higher-end tenants, they may have to experiment with a different mix of stores in the current climate.
“The name of the game is ‘adapt,’” Tron said.
The Promenade at Chenal was originally conceived with a Dillard’s department store in mind, but that plan was put aside before the center was built.
Claflin said the developer, with headquarters in Kansas City and Phoenix, doesn’t want to pin everything to one store anchor, which can leave the shopping center too vulnerable if that anchor leaves.
“We sell based on who’s in the area, who’s shopping at the center. ... So even if you’re the only store open in all of the Promenade you should be able to do all right,” Claflin said.
Danelle Hoffer, who owns Ecofab, an environmentally friendly boutique that opened at the Promenade earlier this month, said that model works for her and her store.
“For us, it was more about the location and being close to Chenal Elementary and green building in that area. We knew we would be subject to generating our own traffic for a little while, until other stores opened,” she said.
Hoffer said she was able to negotiate a shorter-term lease in the Promenade than the three- to 10-year leases other centers were offering, which was a good fit for her relatively new business.
Business, Pages 27 on 11/18/2010