Sears, Struggling to Sell Goods, Markets a Valuable Asset: Real Estate

In 2020, Novak bought another Sears site in Chicago from Seritage, a mix of beige-brick buildings and parking lots across a three-block West Side site that cost $14.8 million. Novak will build 150 apartments and retail space, although the site’s Sears store has been demolished.

Since the pandemic started, Seritage’s stock price has plunged, while its longtime chief executive has left. By September, its portfolio of 266 Sears and Kmart properties, which the company bought for $2.7 billion in 2015, had been whittled to 171, according to a company spokesman. Of those properties, 130 were Sears stores.

Even with a trimmer portfolio, Seritage has continued to plow ahead with its own Sears redevelopments, filings show, including a residential project in West Covina, Calif.

The company is involved in office conversions, too, including Mark 302, a 50,000-square-foot project in Santa Monica, Calif., for which Seritage has teamed up with Invesco, an investment firm. The nearly complete remodeling offers a light-filled atrium and a ground-floor market but has also preserved much of the original 1947 structure, a designated local landmark. The former occupant’s name remains on some facades.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/business/sears-real-estate.html