Shopping centers are everywhere in Colorado Springs, but a shopping center without a grocery as an anchor is going nowhere.
That's one of the biggest challenges faced by Western Centers, a nearly 30-year-old Aurora-based real estate company that purchased the Market at Spring Creek on Colorado Springs' south side last year. The company now is trying to inject life into the center, at South Circle Drive and Monterey Road, south of the Martin Luther King Jr. Bypass.
Western Centers, which paid $2.8 million for the property, according to El Paso County land records, liked the potential of the Market at Spring Creek, said Brian Pesch, the company's chief operating officer. The Spring Creek neighborhood to the west has hundreds of homes, while apartments to the east have new owners, he said.
"It's a great piece of real estate in a growing and resurging market," Besch said. "So we bought it as an opportunity to kind of try and turn it around."
Built in the late 1980s, the Market at Spring Creek once boasted a Cub Foods grocery as an anchor that attracted shoppers from the south, southeast and southwest sides. Those customers then patronized other stores in the shopping center.
But Cub Foods left Colorado Springs around 2001 when the chain's franchised stores were sold to Albertsons. Some former Cub locations like the one at Market at Spring Creek were rebranded by Albertsons as Grocery Warehouse stores.
After several years, however, the Grocery Warehouse stores also closed.
In 2007, the anchor space at Market at Spring Creek was reduced in size and taken over by Hispanic grocer Rancho Liborio, which was part of a Southern California chain. Rancho Liborio only lasted five years before it closed in 2012.
"It's been through its life cycle," Pesch said of the center.
In 2014, a previous owner of the shopping center leased much of the anchor space to Camerons Products, a Colorado Springs designer and wholesaler of cookware, grills, smokers and other specialty kitchen and barbecue items that relocated from another part of the city.
Filling that space was good for the shopping center. But as a tenant, Pesch said, Camerons isn't a classic anchor whose customer traffic benefits other shopping center stores and restaurants, known in the industry as inline retailers.
"If you think about a big grocery store, people go there and they go in and out, and out of convenience, that physical traffic supports the inline retailers," Pesch said. "Camerons, because it doesn't pull that sort of traffic, it doesn't generate that renewable sort of traffic to help support the inline."
And Camerons isn't going anywhere; it exercised an option to renew its lease and will be at the Market at Spring Creek for another five years, Pesch said.
"It's a real challenge," Pesch said. "It's a 100,000-square-foot shopping center and 60,000 square feet of it is occupied by Camerons, which really isn't pulling people."
So how does Western Centers overcome the lack of a grocery store anchor — at least for the next five years?
One obvious strategy is to fill the center with more inline stores and retailers. Fillmore Discount Liquors and Korean restaurant Yong's Korean Kitchen recently joined the center's lineup that includes Subway, Dollar Tree, EZ Pawn and State Farm.
But until it can land a grocery as an anchor, Western Centers has sought to spruce up the Market at Spring Creek and give customers a reason to come — even if they can't buy groceries.
The company has invested in new LED lighting in the parking lot and lights to brighten a back parking lot, Pesch said. The lights make the center more appealing and safer, he said.
"There had been some street races and other car clubs and guys that were using the parking lot as their drag strip," he said. "We've put a stop to that, trying to make it a little bit more neighborhood friendly instead of just a rough-and-tumble sort of hangout spot."
Western Centers also has painted the shopping center, done some paving work, restriped its parking lot and made landscape improvements that included pruning trees and repairing water sprinklers.
"Coming back as being a local Colorado owner, really trying to pay attention to some of the details and improve the shopping center as a whole, so it looks like somebody is paying attention," Pesch said.
Another upgrade: a pair of murals — a Front Range backdrop and a field of flowers — painted by local artists on the shopping center's south side walls, which had a dull, gray, industrial look, he said.
"Our thought was to take that and make it more of a feature with local art for the community, so they're not looking at this blank wall, but looking at a vibrant sort of mural and artscape," Besch said. "It livens up and energizes the back side of the shopping center. It seems like a nominal sort of thing to do, but it makes a huge difference. ... It doesn't look like an industrial park, but looks like a piece of urban art."
In April, Western Centers launched Food Truck Friday, bringing four to 10 food trucks to the shopping center each Friday during lunchtime as a way to attract area residents and shoppers to the center. For spring and summer next year, Western Centers hopes to expand the event to Friday evenings.
The shopping center also hosted a one-time weekend festival with a magician, balloons, a band and other activities, Pesch said.
Western Centers, he said, is trying to make the Market at Spring Creek "part of the community and an asset to the community. We can be a commercial property and just kind of sit there and collect rent or we can be part of the community where we can have some outreach and have the community support the small retailers that are there."
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December 26, 2019 at 02:30AM
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Without a grocery anchor, Colorado Springs shopping center owner looks for creative ways to boost customer traffic - Colorado Springs Gazette
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