MidTown Inc. hopes a $40,000 analysis of residents’ spending will help match it with popular retailers
Information will help organization bring regional and national retailers to Columbus
By TONY ADAMS - tadams@ledger-enquirer.com
The Midtown area of Columbus is not sitting back and waiting for new retailers to stumble upon it.
MidTown Inc., a nonprofit group whose mission it is to revitalize and grow the area in the city’s center, is spending $40,000 on an analysis that will track residents’ spending.
That information will be used to match Midtown with prospective retailers, who will then be courted aggressively by the local group and developers.
“It’s a 60-day process and we are halfway through. So by October we will know our match,” said Teresa Tomlinson, executive director of MidTown Inc.
Call it the eHarmony version of connecting businesses yearning for new customers with consumers wishing for more and better shopping outlets.
“They can match up our economic information with retailers regionally and also national retailers,” Tomlinson said. “And we now will have the tools we need to call the Trader Joe’s of the world, the Fresh Markets of the world, and say: We meet your criteria. You need to come here.”
Trader Joe’s is a California-based specialty grocery store chain, while The Fresh Market is a gourmet supermarket chain out of North Carolina. Both have loyal followings.
“I’m not making any promises,” Tomlinson said. “I’m just saying these are the types of retailers that we expect to be armed to approach.”
Fort Worth, Texas-based Buxton Company is the 15-year-old firm that is conducting the analysis that will track not only local spending among Midtown residents, but their online and out-of-town purchasing activity as well.
For example, someone who travels to Atlanta or Birmingham, Ala., and uses their credit card linked to the 31906 area code will be included in the research.
“It may not be what you bought specifically,” Tomlinson said. “But they’ll know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent over a period of time in various markets that originated from this Midtown area. That way we can see what the true demand is.”
The Midtown area of Columbus generally stretches from 10th Avenue near downtown east to Interstate 185, with Macon and Wynnton roads a major corridor cutting through it.
Midtown’s largest shopping center is Cross Country Plaza, a 415,000-square-foot power center situated near the intersection of Macon Road and I-185. It also happens to be the city’s oldest shopping center, built in the 1950s.
Cross Country welcomed one new tenant last week with the opening of a 4,500-square-foot Wachovia bank branch.
But it also taken its lumps, losing a major tenant, Steve and Barry’s, after the clothing retailer went bankrupt last fall. It occupied 44,000 square feet of space.
Earlier this year, the center’s CVS/pharmacy store relocated to a competitor’s outparcel nearby. And now a tenant targeted for a new 5,500-square-foot speculative building next to Wachovia has pulled out of its deal.
“We’re just starting to get some stronger feelers out there. I think tenants took 2009 off,” said Leo Wiener, a partner with Glenwood Development Co., a Huntersville, N.C.-based firm that bought Cross Country Plaza in 2004. “I guess the general feeling is they’re starting to tip-toe out and think about what they want to do in 2010.”
A key next year will be filling the former Steve and Barry’s space, which combined with the former CVS space, measures about 60,000 square feet.
The existing tenants at Cross Country appear to be stable, Wiener said.
“I think they’re taking their lumps like everybody else,” he said. “But, frankly, in comparing the sales there versus sales we have elsewhere in our (shopping center) portfolio, they’ve held up reasonably well. Some of them are actually up in 2009, which is a little surprising. But we really have no disasters looming at this point.”