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What's in store for bay area shoppers

St. Petersburg Times retail writer Mark Albright is at the convention in Las Vegas, where he heard: a possible solution to Old Hyde Park Village's loss of its struggling movie theater; plans for an outlet mall in Pasco County; and a developer's vision to line a verdant flank of I-75 in Pasco with more big-box stores.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published May 24, 2006

The new owners planning an overhaul of Old Hyde Park Village in Tampa are talking with the nonprofit Tampa Theater about providing space to keep alive the village's reputation as a place to see low-budget independent films.

The talks surfaced on the eve of the new owner's June 7 rezoning hearing on plans for building two more condo towers at the village. One of them will wipe out the Sunrise Theaters, which struggled for years in a former seven-screen AMC Theater to build an audience for nonmainstream movies.

"We're trying to see if we can provide space for them or the Sunrise people in a couple of smaller 50- to 75-seat theaters,'' said David Wasserman, the Providence, R.I., developer trying to bring the largely vacant center back to life. "We've been listening to neighborhood concerns.''

Wasserman also said the center's popular Wine Exchange will move to new quarters in the center's town square, which will sport a sprawling outdoor cafe.

ANOTHER SHOT AT PREMIUM OUTLETS

One of the nation's largest outlet mall developers plans to open the 120-store Tampa Premium Outlets in Pasco County in 2008.

The site, about 60 acres at the southeast corner of State Route 52 and Interstate 75, is remarkably close to one assembled by the owners of Prime Outlets Ellenton that never got off the ground about a decade ago.

Chelsea Property Group, which owns 33 so-called upscale outlet malls including the Orlando Premium Outlets in the shadow of Walt Disney World, quietly began marketing the project to prospective tenants this week at the convention.

''We like the market and heard interest from a core group of retailers, or we would not have gone this far,'' said Michele Rothstein, vice president of marketing for Chelsea. "But it is still early in the process.''

The project would be similar to the race-track design of the open air Orlando Premium Outlets. Chelsea considers its properties "upscale outlets'' because they offer designer-name tenants, typically such names as Barney's New York, Brooks Brothers, Versace and Salvatore Ferragamo. But the Chelsea malls also typically house plenty of Ralph Lauren, Nike and Adidas.

Chelsea, which secured a contract to buy part of the Pasco property from an Atlanta investment group that bought 629 acres at the corner three years ago, is owned by Simon Property Group, the nation's biggest mall owner. Simon owns Tyrone Square and Gulfview Square malls in west-central Florida.

While some of the goods sold at outlet malls are goods that couldn't be disposed through full-price retailers, most of the industry's $15-billion in sales in 2005 came from goods manufactured to be priced and sold in a discounted outlet mall setting.

"Outlets have become a very profitable and viable distribution channel in their own right,'' said Linda Humphers, editor of Value Retail News, the industry trade bible that is based in Clearwater.

Indeed, Chelsea's outlets provided only 6 percent of Simon's leaseable retail space in 2005 but 13 percent of the company's operating income.

A new outlet mall in the region would ratchet up competition to Prime Outlets Ellenton, which is planning its own expansion, 63 miles south on I-75. Talk of another outlet mall in the market died about a decade ago after the Mills Corp., owner of Sawgrass Mills in Broward County, made a run at buying the Florida State Fairground for one.

Chelsea, which reports that its centers were 99 percent leased in 2005, is one of the three major outlet mall operators to survive the industry's overbuilding binge in the 1990s. It reported sales of $444 a square foot in 2005, about $100 higher than the national average for conventional malls.

BIG BOXES IN PASCO

The Groves at Wesley Chapel, another big-box shopping center targeted to front I-75 in Pasco County, doesn't have an approved storm water discharge plan yet. But the project does have enough signed contracts and written commitments to start construction the moment it does.

"We're ready to run and hope to break ground in August,'' said Bill Krahe, president of Echo Development, a Pittsburgh developer building the project on the northwest corner of I-75 and State Route 54.

Workers began clearing the site last week for the 300,000-square-foot first phase. Stores lined up to open as soon as next summer are Best Buy, PetSmart, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Ross Dress for Less, Michael's Crafts and Dick's Sporting Goods. Also signed up is Ulta, a cosmetics store the size of a CVS drugstore. Construction would also begin on an 18-screen Cobb Theater plus 11 restaurants including Chili's and Red Robin. Once the buildings start taking shape, leasing also begins on the 50,000 square feet of the center reserved for small stores and offices.

Nobody has been lined up yet for the other two phases of the project.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.

[Last modified May 24, 2006, 05:51:48]