Obviously the big news of the day was the fact that TJ Maxx is headed to The Newport Pavilion. The discount clothing retailer’s bricks and mortar are already under construction on the south corner of the development next to Dick’s Sporting Goods.
The long-term speculation was that Marshall’s could be the next retailer to be announced, but it turns out its sister store was the next on the block. Back in June, FortThomasMatters made some guesses about what would be the next retailer. While we guessed correctly that it would be a clothing-first retailer, we were a little off base from TJ Maxx.
A few more updates from our past stories and some questions sent to us on behalf of our readers. This information is directly from our Anchor Associates contact:
– Chipotle and BW3 are still on schedule to open this Fall. Obviously the construction phases are near complete. Perhaps the best ancillary benefit to the opening of these two retailers will be the opening of the outlet from the parking lot area onto Carothers Road. The traffic will continue to increase but pressure release points like these will continue to help.
– There are no plans at the moment for an Olive Garden restaurant.
– Anchor Associates said that Dick’s Sporting Goods would “probably” open this year. I would say that the retailer would do everything in their power to open before Christmas.
– Panera, which will also be located near Dick’s and TJ Maxx, will open in 2014. Nothing more specific on that at this time.
Onto the traffic. (Click here for our last article on the traffic).
Most readers use the same logic on this issue: “How could the Newport Pavilion not know the amount of traffic that would result in the building of this development?”
Well, the answer is that they did. They use those statistics to woo new retailers to settle into The Newport Pavilion. (ADT stands for Average Daily Traffic)
There has always been a long-term solution for traffic, however when new investors bought the development from Bear Creek Capital in 2011 (indirectly purchasing the loan from Bank of America), the influx of retailers increased at a faster rate than the original principals of Bear Creek Capital had anticipated.
The new investors, Anchor Investment Partners, were formed at the beginning of 2011 by Anchor Associate partners, Charles Townsend and Roger Watson. Their goal was to find retail properties that had debt of leasing issues to acquire them and improve their performance.
The acquisition of The Newport Pavilion was the first by Anchor Investment Partners. So perhaps the traffic issue is not one of negligence by the developer, but may just be growing pains by a newly formed investment group whose specialty was bringing new retailers into an ailing development and not necessarily traffic management for those developments.
They are simply growing faster than the original developers and the city of Newport had planned.Â
Now that bigger “sub-anchor” stores have been announced, perhaps the developers will now turn their focus to the growing traffic issue.
