ST. LOUIS BUSINESS JOURNAL -- What is a loss for St. Louis Outlet Mall is a gain for Big Sports Properties.
After facing rejection in Chesterfield, the group has found an opportunity in Hazelwood to play out its vision of a 138-acre youth sports complex at the St. Louis Outlet Mall site at 5555 St. Louis Mills Blvd. Big Sports Properties said the project, called PowerPlex, will bring in 2.4 million annual visitors.
The proposal could not come at a better time for the nearly 1.2 million-square-foot mall, whose "income is rapidly deteriorating and will essentially disappear in the next 5 years," according to documents the Business Journal obtained through an open-records request.
In 2016, St. Louis Outlet Mall had $2.27 million in net income — a 40.6 percent decline from 2015. In fact, the month of December, typically part of a seasonal windfall for retailers, was even worse for the mall, which reported a negative net income of $204,657.51, documents show. (U.S. retail sales during November and December spiked 4 percent over 2015 to $658.3 billion, according to the National Retail Federation.)
Documents suggest that the mall’s owner, New York-based Namdar Realty Group, which bought the mall in February 2016 for $4.4 million, tried to cut expenses that year.
