After three years, plans for a high-rise, mixed-use development at the former site of Valley View mall are scrapped for good.
Seritage Growth Properties had planned to build 2 million square feet of office, retail and residential space at the North Dallas site. The publicly-traded REIT even held a commencement ceremony in 2019 to kick off construction with its then-partner KDC Development.
But now, Seritage is selling the 17-acre property near the northwest corner of LBJ Freeway and Preston Road, the Dallas Morning News reported Monday.
Seritage was spun off of the troubled Sears department store in 2015 to manage the real estate assets inherited from the bankrupt retailer. Last month — with its deadline to pay off a loan from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway on the horizon — its board put forward plans to sell off all of its assets and dissolve.
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Built in the 1970s, the Valley View mall was once a commercial nerve center in North Dallas. It has since been mostly demolished, with the last department store closing almost a decade ago. Since then, portions of the mall site have been bought up by multiple owners that have worked on separate redevelopment plans for their properties.
Unlike Red Bird Mall in southwest Dallas and the Collin Creek Mall site in Plano, Valley View has suffered from arrested redevelopment.
The site was the subject of litigation between Dallas-based Beck Ventures and Ross Perot Jr.’s Hillwood Urban. Beck announced big plans for the former mall in 2012— a $2 billion mixed-use development known as Dallas Midtown. Despite a showy groundbreaking ceremony in June 2016, Beck failed to raze the mall by the tear-down date and City Hall eventually rescinded $36 million in tax incentives.
In 2017, Hillwood, in partnership with EF Properties, went to work on a development also on the site of the former mall. But when they began demolishing their portion of the mall, Beck sued the companies. The mall was finally demolished by Seritage and KDC in 2019.
With all the misstarts tied to the Valley View site, JLL, who is marketing the land on behalf of Seritage, has already renamed it Vista Commons. According to JLL’s marketing pitch, Vista Commons is “shovel ready” and “offers flexible densities for residential, office, retail and hospitality uses.”
— Maddy Sperling