PLEASANTON — Sears will close stores in Pleasanton and Santa Rosa, marking two big local casualties for a big-box retailer that has staggered through a string of financial losses since the Great Recession.
The stores that Sears will close in the Bay Area are located at Stoneridge Shopping Center in Pleasanton and Santa Rosa Plaza in downtown Santa Rosa. Sears earlier this year closed stores at Oakridge Mall in San Jose and in San Rafael.
The big question: What might these stores — and dozens of other soon-to-close Sears retail sites — become? Will they be filled quickly? Or will the respective malls be haunted by empty spaces for years to come?
“The cities being affected by this are going to push hard to keep a retail use operating at the old Sears locations,” said Jim Shepherd, a senior vice president with the Walnut Creek office of Lockehouse Retail Group, a commercial realty brokerage. “They will want to keep retail for their tax base.”
Experts didn’t seem to think it’s likely that another general merchandise store would fill the old Sears sites in the Bay Area. Retailers have been forced to navigate through a landscape that’s become more treacherous amid the e-commerce dominance of tech titans such as Amazon, Google and eBay.
“I would think perhaps some sort of entertainment user could go into a location such as the Sears site in Pleasanton,” Shepherd said. “It could be a movie theater, or some other entertainment-oriented use.”
It’s also possible that non-retail uses could go into a site such as Pleasanton, according to Edward Del Beccaro, a senior managing director with Transwestern, a commercial realty brokerage.
“You would have to tear it down, but you could see an office building, a hotel, or residential at the Pleasanton Sears location,” he said. “You could even have a combination of a hotel or office building because the parcel is big enough.”
The remaining anchor stores at Stoneridge are Macy’s, Nordstrom and JCPenney.
The owner of the Sears property in Pleasanton is an affiliate of mall owner Indianapolis-based Simon Property that’s called Stoneridge S&S, according to Alameda County property records. The Simon entity paid Sears Roebuck $45 million in November 2017 for the Sears store site, the documents show.
However, the direct connection of a parking structure to the Sears store could make a bulldozing of the property tricky. That means an entertainment use that works within the existing structure might be more feasible for Pleasanton.
“Entertainment uses of some kind would tend to draw more people into the mall,” Shepherd said. “The other retailers in the mall could benefit from an entertainment operation.”