SAGINAW TOWNSHIP, MI — Two investors competed in a bidding war during the final minutes of the online auction to buy Fashion Square Mall, with one bid outstripping the rest by $10.8 million, officials said.
Auction representatives said the winning bid would not be considered a final sale until additional paperwork is completed within 30 days. The officials said they would keep the identity of the investor secret until then.
Bidding for Fashion Square Mall began at noon on Monday, August 22, and was scheduled to conclude at 11 am on Wednesday, August 24.
For much of the event, the highest bid was $6.3 million, the auction website said. But a flurry of activity — 10 deals in all — pushed that figure up by millions of dollars during the dramatic last 25 minutes.
As of 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the highest bid was $7.3 million. Three additional bids brought the price to $8.3 million just before the clock struck 11 a.m. An $8.8 million bid, submitted with less than 30 seconds remaining, reset the website’s timer that was on countdown to the time when no more offers would be accepted. Each new offer after that point resets the countdown timer to three minutes, extending the event past the 11am deadline.
There were six offers entered after 11 am
At one point, a $10.6 million offer came moments after getting the highest bid. However, with about five seconds left on the clock, a $10.7 million counteroffer started the countdown again. The next, and final, offer of $10.8 million was submitted at 11:14 a.m.
The auction ended three minutes later.
Southfield-based real estate firm NAI Farbman was one of the managers of the online auction, along with Ten-X, an Irvine, California-based real estate firm.
The mall was available for purchase in part because its previous owner, Great Neck, New York-based Namdar Realty Group, defaulted in 2020 on $34.8 million in mortgage debt owed to Wells Fargo. The lending giant then seized the property last year as part of a foreclosure auction, with plans to sell it at this week’s online auction.
Fashion Square Mall opened on October 4, 1972, when shoppers first walked through the doors of the facility built on 71 acres of farmland in north Saginaw Township.
At the time, anchor tenants JCPenney and Sears were the site’s main attractions. Other inaugural retailers included Town & Country Fashions, William C. Wiechmann Co., Bintz Sports, Carter Shop, Seitner’s, Alfano’s Stride Rite, and Tait’s Hobby Shop.
Fashion Square Mall filled with customers during the mall boom that helped define American culture in the 1970s and 1980s. In turn, the mall fed a hungry business district, attracting commercial growth on Bay Streets. and Tittabawassee during those early decades.
In 1993, a new food court was added, keeping customers fed during long sessions spent browsing the stores.
Eight years later, the facility underwent a $10 million facelift that applied a 21st-century shine to its 1970s-built bodywork.
However, foot traffic has declined in recent decades, both as a result of the region’s declining population and a shift in consumer shopping habits toward online stores.
In January 2001, Chattanooga-based CBL & Associates Property Inc. purchased the complex along with 20 other regional malls and two malls from the mall’s original developer, Cleveland-based Richard E. Jacobs Group Inc. , for $1.2 billion.
The mall was sold again in July 2016 to Namdar Realty Group, along with The Lakes in Muskegon, for a total price of $66.5 million, including the assumption of a $38.2 million loan guaranteed by Fashion Square Mall. .
Not all of the 529,944-square-foot mall was available at this week’s auction.
While most of the stores in the 100-unit mall are tenants, Macy’s has its own checkout there.
Sears also owned its own checkout in the northernmost corner of the facility, though the store closed in 2019. Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based Transformco, which now owns Sears and its former mall space, hired Stokas Bieri Real Estate to sell the old Sears unit. That property is still for sale.
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Source: www.mlive.com