Walmart is now a mall owner.
On Tuesday, the big-box retailer confirmed that it bought Monroeville Mall, which is roughly 12 miles east of Pittsburgh.
In a statement, Walmart said it “is very interested in being part of any future redevelopment of this site.” It declined to share specific plans for the future of the mall.
CBL Properties sold the mall in a $34 million all-cash deal, according to a news release from the Tennessee-based mall owner in late January. The company did not name the buyer at the time.
Walmart’s purchase is an example of the unexpected ways that malls are being redeveloped and repurposed. Shopping centers have added new restaurants, turned former stores into apartments or gotten demolished for completely new uses, as mall anchors like Sears have shuttered and others like Macy’s are downsizing.
Some malls have changed to reflect evolving buying habits, becoming Amazon fulfillment centers where workers pack up purchases and send them to shoppers’ doors.
Tenants at Monroeville Mall include department stores Macy’s and JCPenney, specialty retailers like Claire’s, Victoria’s Secret and American Eagle, and a Cinemark movie theater, according to Monroeville Mall’s website. The mall is on a 186-acre site.
Walmart’s real estate deal was previously reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Walmart’s previous deals have been more retail related, including the $3.3 billion acquisition of e-commerce startup Jet.com. But it also acquired smart TV maker Vizio last year in a $2.3 billion deal, as it bulks up its advertising business.
Walmart hired Texas-based Cypress Equities to manage the property and oversee the mall’s redevelopment.
Chris Maguire, CEO of Cypress Equities, said the company has worked with the discounter before to find new sites, build stores or close older locations. But he said Walmart’s interest in a mall caught him by surprise.
Walmart brought Cypress in to look at the project in early October, Maguire said. Now, he said, the project is “shifting into planning mode,” and a design and architecture team will work on a master plan for the mall.
“This is going to be a retail-driven, mixed-use project,” he said.
He said there’s a need for more entertainment and food and beverage concepts in the area. And he said the company has spoken to the city about turning some of the site into housing.
Walmart has more than 4,600 stores and about 600 locations of Sam’s Club, its membership-based warehouse club, in the U.S. Both stores, Walmart and Sam’s Club, have been expanding.
Two years ago, Sam’s Club announced that it planned to open more than 30 stores in the U.S. over a five-year period. Walmart said early last year that it expected to build more than 150 stores over the next five years, with some of those locations being a conversion from a smaller to a larger-format store.
Walmart opened three stores last year in North Carolina, Florida and Georgia, and it plans to open a dozen more locations over the next 12 months, Hunter Hart, senior vice president of Walmart Realty, said in an interview in late January. Many of those stores will open in high-growth parts of the country, such as North Texas or Houston, he said.
It’s also made a more aggressive push to refresh its big-box stores with features like brighter lighting and more spacious aisles. Over the past three years, it has remodeled more than 2,000 stores, Hart said.
Going forward, Hart said Walmart plans to remodel about 650 locations per year — a step up from its typical cadence of 450 to 500 per year.
Walmart did not say if it is considering any other mall purchases.
Cypress’ Maguire said Walmart’s deal could inspire other similar projects.
“As we all know, there’s a lot of malls out there in the U.S. that aren’t going to operate as an enclosed mall,” he said. “So hopefully things like this are going to happen in other markets with properties that have really deteriorated over a long period of time and need a new vision.”
