Big Box Retail Goes Small Box
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We’re accustomed to seeing 180,000 – 220,000 square feet Walmart Super Centers all over the country over the last couple of decades, but many communities fight tooth and nail to keep net leased retail of this size out of their communities.
The big box large triple net retail market is morphing a bit to address these concerns. The Westerville Triple net real estate market now has one of the new format Walmarts at just over 100,000 square feet. It probably would have been even smaller, but this old triple net leased retail space was once occupied by Lazarus and had been mostly vacant for ten years or more. So in this instance, Westerville had the opportunity for a major anchor tenant and the chance to completely rebuild the tired old Westerville net leased retail center.
It’s been a big plus for the south side of Westerville and will bring in additional net leased retail development in the Westerville south area.
The big box net lease retail strategy is going even smaller with the advent of the Walmart neighborhood market store format of 38,000 to 45,000 square feet. Walmart president and CEO, Bill Simons states that they plan to open more than 200 Walmart neighborhood centers over the next 18 months to better compete with CVS, Walgreens, Rite aid, Aldi and the dollar stores. I would expect to see a few of these in the Columbus Ohio net leased retail market over the next few years.
Target is also experimenting with their new City Target concept in a few triple net retail markets. Only two have opened so far in 2013 for a total of seven. The locations have been in the Seattle, Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles net leased markets. They have been a far larger ‘small box’ format ranging in size from 80,000 to 100,000 square feet. At that size, what’s the point? Target is proceeding much more cautiously moving to the smaller format than has Walmart.
