News

Few investors are queuing up to buy America’s unloved regional shopping malls. Landlords like Westfield’s owner need creative ways to unload them if they are to patch up their stock prices.

U.S. malls have lost a third of their value since their 2017 peak as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to e-commerce, according to real estate analytics firm Green Street. 

ome investors are making contrarian bets on the most tired malls. Real estate specialists Namdar Realty Group… have been buying assets cheaply and continuing to run them as retail locations.

To read more, please visit The Wall Street Journal.

Igal Namdar and Elliot Nassim first teamed up a decade ago to buy problem U.S. shopping malls.

Now they rank among the biggest all-cash buyers of the nation’s hard-luck malls. The pandemic has made it even tougher for mall property owners already struggling to keep up on mortgage payments, resulting in several major players throwing in the towel on distressed properties and with more likely.

The duo, through Namdar Realty Group and Mason Asset Management out of Great Neck, Long Island, currently owns about 60 million square feet of shopping center space, including roughly of 100 open-air properties are 65 enclosed malls. 

To read more, please visit MarketWatch.com.

Some of the well-known participating landlords include: Simon Property Group, Westfield Group, Tanger Outlets, Brookfield, Kimco, Phillips Edison, Urban Edge, Brixmor and Federal. (Entire list below)

Participating landlords have committed to 90 days of free rent in temporary, or “pop-up” space. In return, the small businesses agree to pay for desired capital improvements and utilities, along with a one-month security deposit. Azor herself will offer up free space to support local businesses at each of her shopping centers where there is availability.

List of all participating landlords:

List of all participating landlords:

1. Azor Advisory Services
2. Arrow
3. Basser Kaufman
4. Bayer Properties
5. Brickstone
6. Brixmor Property Group
7. Brookfield
8. Cana Development
9. CBL
10. Celso Leite
11. Collett
12. DLC Management
13. Federal Realty
14. First National Realty Partners
15. Gart Properties
16. Garrity
17. Graff
18. Hutton
19. InvenTrust
20. Kimco
21. Linear
22. Mason Asset Management

To read more, please visit Yahoo! Finance

Sapna Maheshwari recently interviewed Elliot Nassim, Mason Asset Management, for her story “With Department Stores Disappearing, Malls Could Be Next.”

The directory map for the Northfield Square Mall in Bourbonnais, Ill., has three glaring spaces where large department stores once stood. Soon there will be a fourth vacancy, now that J.C. Penney is liquidating stores after filing for bankruptcy.

With so much empty space and brick-and-mortar retail in the midst of seismic changes even before the pandemic hit, the mall’s owners have been talking with local officials about identifying a “higher and better use for the site,” though they have declined to elaborate on what that could be.

“Filling in one anchor space, generally, is doable,” said Elliot Nassim, president of Mason Asset Management, which co-owns the Northfield Square Mall and dozens of other enclosed shopping centers. “But once you get hit by two others and you’re dealing with three anchor closures, that’s usually where we become a little more likely to put it into the bucket of a redevelopment.”

To read more, please visit The New York Times.

In recent years a lot of experts have predicted that the retail and healthcare industries would converge. Pre-COVID, retailers like Walmart WMT, Amazon AMZN, Best Buy BBY and CVS jumped on the bandwagon of leveraging opportunities in healthcare. But COVID-19 has quickly accelerated this trend to a new reality.

Elliot Nassim, President of Mason Asset Management was recently quoted in a Pymnts piece that “Today’s malls are not only anchored by department stores, but include entertainment, healthcare and fitness studios… This creates an exciting opportunity for the communities that surround these properties.”

To read more, please visit Forbes.

As the country struggles to build enough temporary hospital beds to accommodate the surge of coronavirus-related illness, a parallel rush is on to set up sites to test for the virus.

Prime real estate for testing is under tents in large parking lots adjacent to commercial properties, including retail but also office and industrial. Yet a boom of testing sites in the parking lots of the nation’s largest retailers, which tend to be centrally located in densely populated areas, hasn’t materialized.

One example is in upstate New York, where Mason Asset Management and Namdar Realty Group have make the parking lot of The Shops at Ithaca Mall in Ithaca available to be a COVID-19 drive-thru test site at no charge. The real estate companies worked in conjunction with Cayuga Medical Center and Tompkins County officials to set up the facility.

In addition to the test center, the American Red Cross used 18K SF of vacant space at the mall for a blood drive last Thursday, at no charge to the organization. The blood donation site was in a former Planet Fitness.  

“It’s our hope that by using our vacant space for these initiatives, we’ll help to curb the spread of the virus in Ithaca and the surrounding area,” said the mall’s general manager, Gina Speno. 

To read more, please visit bisnow.com

New York mall owners are turning their parking lots into corona virus testing centers and donating space for blood drives.

Long Island-based Mason Asset Management, Namdar Realty Group, and CH Capital Group have transformed the parking lot of The Shops at Ithaca Mall (pictured top) into a Covid-19 drive-through test site, working in conjunction with Cayuga Medical Center and Tompkins County officials.

The Sampling Center will be situated at the front of the shopping center, which is located at 40 Catherwood Road in Ithaca, New York.

“We are thrilled to be offering Cayuga Medical Center a space to open a Covid-19 drive-through test site, which will provide our local community with much needed testing capabilities,” said Jelson Santos, Director of Operations at Namdar Realty Group, the branch of the owner-operator partnership which manages its properties.

 “While our country continues to fight the spread of this unprecedented pandemic, we are committed to doing everything we can to best support the communities within which we operate.”

To read more, please visit Real Estate Weekly.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Namdar Realty Group and CH Capital Group announced Tuesday they have transformed the parking lot of the Shops at Ithaca Mall into a COVID-19 drive-thru test site, working in conjunction with Cayuga Medical Center and Tompkins County officials.

The center will be located in front of the shopping center, which is located at 40 Catherwood Road in Ithaca.

“We are thrilled to be offering Cayuga Medical Center a space to open a Covid-19 drive-through test site, which will provide our local community with much needed testing capabilities,” said Jelson Santos, Director of Operations at Namdar Realty Group. “While our country continues to fight the spread of this unprecedented pandemic, we are committed to doing everything we can to best support the communities within which we operate.”

To read more, please visit cnycentral.com

Flemington, home to the nation’s first outlet village, has established a committee that will look at ways to regain some of the once-bustling shopping center’s former glory.

Mayor Betsy Driver announced during Monday’s Borough Council meeting the members of an ad hoc committee that will collaborate with developer Mason Asset Management on a redevelopment plan for the Liberty Village Outlet Marketplace.

To read more, please visit NJ.com.