Iowa City Marketplace works to eliminate vacancies

As Cedar Rapids' Westdale Mall makes efforts to revitalize itself, Iowa City Marketplace continues to find its footing after losing the mall's anchor tenant Von Maur nearly three years ago.

John Arlotti, vice president of California-based CORE Realty, which owns Iowa City Marketplace, said the addition last summer of anchor tenant Lucky's Market has helped draw customers as well as prospective tenants to the building formerly known as Sycamore Mall.

'We're trying to make some deals to fill the rest of the space,” Arlotti said, adding that multiple tenants could sign on as a cluster. 'We're working on bringing together the group, whenever you have more than one, it takes twice as long.”

Those tenants could end up in adjacent storefronts within the marketplace.

The 200,000-square-foot Iowa City Marketplace, near First Avenue and Highway 6, has about 50,000 square feet of vacant space, Arlotti said. While all that area is on the market, Arlotti said he is in discussions with potential retail tenants for about 40,000 square feet of the marketplace's space.

The marketplace's biggest challenge is competing with Coralville's Coral Ridge Mall, which has about 100 businesses within the main mall and among several surrounding stores, Arlotti said.

'It's David and Goliath,” Arlotti said. 'We try to make a deal that will benefit not only us but the entire community. A lot of times we'll make transactions that, economically, aren't really feasible for us, but we have to do it.”

Those deals pay themselves off over time, but Arlotti said it's common that Iowa City Marketplace needs to provide a pretty attractive package to draw in tenants, such as competitive rent.

In addition, the competition with Coral Ridge Mall was a driving factor in recent efforts to 'de-mall” the former Sycamore Mall.

A main component in de-malling the building has included moving most store entrances to face the parking lot, rather than inside corridors as in traditional malls.

Arlotti said much of that adds convenience for visitors.

The building won't lose all its interior hallways, as plans are coming together to create a banquet area for events near the Lucky's Market side of the marketplace.

Lucky's Market store director Charlie Samson said he's been pleasantly satisfied the traffic coming into the Boulder, Colo.-based company's first Iowa store.

'We love it, I think it's got a good position for what we want to do in the community,” he said.

Samson said business and foot traffic has remained strong at the east Iowa City location.

Lucky's Market opened in July, several years after retailer Von Maur left Sycamore Mall for a new Coralville building. Coralville's City Council provided Von Maur with a multimillion-dollar deal to relocate to Coralville's Iowa River Landing.

In 2014, the Iowa City Council approved a seven-year, $1.75 million tax increment finance rebate to the shopping center to help revitalize the area. A portion of those funds were used to prepare the mall for Lucky's Market, which drew criticism from nearby New Pioneer Co-op, some of whose board members contended the chain would cut into the local operation's customer base.