Vacant Sears store in Chicago’s Orland Park hits market

A vacant 200,000-square-foot Sears store in the Chicago suburb of Orland Park is hitting the market after sitting empty.

Seritage Growth has hired CBRE to sell the former Sears store in the Orland Square Mall, one of 100 closed in 2018, Crain’s reported. Seritage has been trying to refill Sears stories, including the Orland Park one, with one or more retailers. The former store in the North Riverside Park Mall is leased to four different businesses: a Round One bowling alley, Aldi, Blink Fitness and Amita Health.

The last Sears in the state of Illinois, in the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, closed in September. Half of that space is now being considered for a deal with fashion retailer Primark.

Some mall owners and developers are transforming their empty spaces into residential use as finding retailers becomes difficult during the pandemic, Dallas-based Centennial Real Estate is building 300-unit apartment complexes on the sites of former Sears stores in Vernon Hills’ Hawthorn Mall and Aurora’s Fox Valley Mall.

Another former Sears in Six Corners is set to be redeveloped into a $90 million six-story residential development.

Including the parking lot outside, the Orland Park store measures more than 16 acres, allowing for multiple redevelopment options. Seritage had reached a deal with AMC to build a 10-screen, 45,000-square-foot theater as part of a larger redevelopment plan, but plans fell through last year.

The company owns several other local properties, including a former Sears in Lombard that is now leased to furniture retailer The Dump and another in Joliet that is being considered for a residential development.

While Seritage owns the former Sears store, Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group owns the Orland Square Mall.

Read more

New York

Seritage terminates leases on most of its Sears, Kmart locations

[CCB] — Victoria Pruitt