New owners to demolish Palm Beach Mall

Rather than redevelop Palm Beach County’s oldest mall into a new outlet center, the partnership that bought the Palm Beach Mall in October has decided to demolish it and build a sparkling new facility, the Palm Beach Post reported.

Now, the $35.5 million New England Development, Eastern Real Estate and Lubert-Adler paid to buy the firm doesn’t seem like such a bargain price, the Post noted, as the cost of planning, preparing and constructing the Palm Beach Fashion Outlets, as they will be known, likely brings the total price north of $100 million.

New England Development Chairman Stephen Karp told the Post that he’d likely file plans with West Palm Beach in the next 90 days. The developers are in talks with a whole host of retailers, and said that JC Penney, one of the two retailers that remain open at the mall, would likely get a new building.

“We’re probably talking to over 100 tenants right now, and some of them are in different stages of negotiations, some of them with lease requests,” Karp said. [Palm Beach Post]