February 5, 2003

MBK sells the rest of remodeled Parkway SuperCenter for $88.5M

Photo courtesy of MBK In 1997, the Portland-based developer MBK bought two failing shopping centers near Southcenter. Reconstruction and new tenants created Parkway SuperCenter.

MBK Northwest, the Portland-based developer that re-made two failing strip retail centers in Tukwila into Parkway SuperCenter, sold the last portion of the center yesterday to Kimco Realty for $88.5 million.

New York-based Kimco, a large real estate investment trust, bought 450,000 of the center's 700,000 square feet, so the price equals $197 per square foot.

MBK sold the first 250,000 square feet two years ago to five smaller, private investment groups that paid a total of $21.5 million, said MBK president Mason Frank. Those sales averaged $86 per square foot and bring the price paid for the full 700,000 square feet to an average of $171 per square foot.

The supercenter is immediately south of the former Southcenter Mall, now called Westfield Shoppingtown Southcenter.

Kimco owns and operates 610 shopping centers in 41 states, Canada and Mexico, including several others in the Puget Sound region. Most of the centers are smaller neighborhood and community centers. The collection totals 81 million square feet.

Kimco bills itself as "the nation's largest publicly traded owner and operator of neighborhood and community shopping centers."

MBK Northwest is a division of Irvine, Calif.-based MBK Real Estate Ltd., which in turn is the real estate development arm of Mitsui & Co. Ltd. of Japan, the world's third largest corporation.

During the last decade, MBK Northwest specialized in turning around flagging retail centers. This started with redevelopment of an amusement park into the Jantzen Beach SuperCenter near Portland, which MBK sold in 1997 for $76 million to a Michigan pension fund advised by Compass Retail.

Later than year MBK bought the 21-year-old Parkway Plaza for $56 million and the adjoining, smaller Pavilion Mall for $5 million. Together they totaled 600,000 square feet.

Frank said then MBK would spend $20 million to raze Pavilion Mall and re-build the rest into a big box "power center," as MBK had done at Jantzen Beach.

Yesterday MBK said Parkway Plaza's and Pavilion Mall's outdated, industrial facades and awkward configurations led to the failure of both properties.

MBK filled the new supercenter with Best Buy, Old Navy, Cost Plus, The Bon Home Store, Marshall's, Pier 1 Imports, Gart Sports and more.

Early last year, MBK turned to the failed Lakewood Mall in Tacoma, one of the region's largest malls at 1.2 million square feet. MBK bought Lakewood from Wells Fargo Bank for about $30 million and started a potentially $100 million remodel to create a 850,000-square-foot outdoor mall.

MBK has finished phase one of the Lakewood re-make, which included demolishing part of the mall, constructing six retail buildings and bringing in a slate of new tenants, including Old Navy and Safeway.

The project also includes the city of Lakewood building a new City Hall on a plot it bought from MBK.

"The sale of Parkway SuperCenter is the largest in MBK Northwest's history and likely the biggest retail sale in the greater Seattle market this year," Frank said. "We are actively seeking new projects and expect to match, and possibly surpass" the supercenter project.

Broker Scott Fuller of Capital Pacific in Portland represented MBK in the sale.