The Mission Lakes Marketplace goes year after year after year with thousands of square feet empty and not even close to being built out. Nothing!
There’s absolutely nothing in approximately 50 percent of the available office/retail space.
In real life that sort of occupancy rate would destroy an investment so who or what is supporting the shopping center?
There isn’t a traditional anchor in the shopping center like a grocery store or a big box outlet so what supports the investment someone or some group made on that land?
Here are some possible reasons the shopping center has not put it’s tenants it has through upsetting or rocky defaults or foreclosures.
- The cell tower that was built on the property has supplemented the income for the marketplace to the point of making a profit.
- The investor(s) have other investments that are keeping the marketplace afloat. (Although not likely because investors don’t usually make as bad of deals as this one looks like here with this center and they wouldn’t have such a gargantuan failure of a leasing agent as they have had with the one in charge of finding occupants for MLMP). They would have scrambled to do something about the low occupancy rate sooner if this was the case.
- Are the cannabis retail shops in the marketplace propping up the shopping center with inflated payments that are off the books and covering the added expenses of carrying a half leased strip mall? Possibly but not too likely.
- Is the owner of the shopping center claiming some sort of exemption or loss on taxes that qualifies him/her/it to receive government financial assistance to keep the investment from going belly up? Possibly.
- Is the investment headed for the City of Desert Hot Springs to buy it in the future? That wouldn’t be a long shot. The City wants to own everything within the city some day. It may take 500 years but they do want majority control over all land and structures within the city limits. This one is possible but not too likely….. Yet.
Back to the shopping center.
This whole south wing of the marketplace is totally empty. It’s even empty wrapping around the corner up against Green Pearl Cannabis Dispensary on the right hand side of the picture.
Here are some pictures of the unfinished and un built, vacant, costly, thousands of s/f of retail and/or office space.
Then on the other side of the plaza this segment on the North-West corner is just about totally empty also.
Here are some of the empty units in this same segment next to the Coughy Shop cannabis dispensary.
Last but not least we see this stand alone building on the North-East corner that has a nice fireplace setting on either end of the building. It’s completely empty and it even has a dirt floor inside. Years after it was built it still has an un-poured floor inside.
The fireplaces never even got the plastic wrap removed off of the stainless covers over their boxes. That’s how frozen in build out these units still are.
Here is the inside of that corner stand alone unit that no business has ever even occupied. This is over 2000 square feet of large potential that’s been sitting for almost a half a decade empty.
So what gives? What makes this shopping center so unique that it can have hundreds of weeks of half of the shops suffering from emptiness and still not go bankrupt? Is the reason one of the ones I listed above? Is it a combination of some of them? Who knows.
I’d sure like to know the answer to that question because it’s all part of the health of our city Desert Hot Springs. This piece of evidence of how our city is doing is something that can be looked at as a health checkup item on the health of our city checklist.
We’re anemic when it comes to retail health in this city and that’s an indicator of some other problem that’s causing that retail anemia to occur.
On the other side of the anemia is what the anemia will cause to happen to our city if not treated.
Because anemia in the human body causes fatigue and slowing down, we don’t want fatigue and slow down to occur in our beautiful city of Desert Hot Springs. Nevertheless we most likely can’t do much about the empty storefronts in the Mission Lakes Marketplace.
But what we can do is understand more about the sicknesses our city lags from. Retail anemia is definitely one of them.
I hope this article was interesting to you.
