Sears closed its two Colorado Springs stores in 2019, saying goodbye to the city after more than six decades.
A year earlier, Kmart turned off its blue-light specials and shut its last local store.
In 2015, a Sam's Club in the Springs closed to make way for another of the member-only warehouses in a new location.
When national chains and other well-known retail brands shutter large stores in the Pikes Peak region, they leave behind more than just empty brick-and-mortar buildings.
Their departures mean building owners and landlords inherit the challenge of filling the expansive spaces at a time when the retail landscape has undergone dramatic shifts because of changing consumer habits and the advent of online shopping.
Some national brands have downsized their number of stores and the amount of space they occupy; others increasingly focus on digital sales over shopper foot traffic; and several more have simply gone out of business.
The result: finding one traditional retailer to fill the space of another isn't so easy anymore in Colorado Springs and elsewhere.
And that's forced many owners, landlords and real estate investors to embrace a variety of new uses for their retail buildings, which might get chopped up for smaller tenants, remodeled or even torn down altogether to clear the way for a new purpose.
"You've got to think creatively about it," said Patrick Kerscher, a commercial broker with the local office of national real estate firm CBRE. "It's no longer, if one big-box retail tenant moves out, there's another two or three big-box retail tenants waiting in the wings to backfill the space.
"You've got to think of other users, other categories," he said. "From medical, to freight, flex (office and research), warehouse, education. Just anything creative to take over the large blocks."
Some retail building owners have done just that, opting to convert department stores, groceries and specialty retail spaces into gyms, family fun centers and light industrial uses.
Some examples:
• Kmart, which anchored the Fillmore Marketplace shopping center northeast of Fillmore Street and Nevada Avenue, closed in 2018. The building's California owner then gutted the 104,000-square-foot structure; it's now home to a VASA Fitness center and the RoadHouse Cinemas movie theater complex.
• Rustic Hills North, a 1970s-era shopping center northeast of Academy and Palmer Park boulevards, was once home to an Albertsons grocery, Longs Drugs and several smaller retailers. A suburban Chicago group bought the mostly vacant property last year and plans to convert three buildings and 207,000 square feet into light industrial uses, such as warehouses for e-commerce retailers; space for construction industry suppliers; and carpeting, flooring and tile showrooms.
• The Sam's Club that closed in 2015 along South Academy Boulevard stood vacant until it was leased by Amazon, which has remodeled the 135,000-square-foot space into a warehouse and distribution facility that the online retail giant calls a delivery station.
• Toys R Us, the national retailer, closed its 47,000-square-foot Springs store four years ago southwest of Academy Boulevard and Galley Road. A Denver company has converted the building into a self-storage facility.
The city's two Sears stores have provided both an opportunity and challenge when it comes to what to do with aging retail spaces and their surrounding property.
The Sears at 2050 Southgate Road, in the Broadmoor Towne Center on the city's south side, was purchased by a real estate investment group a few months after the retailer closed in March 2019.
That group, headed by Magnum Shooting Center founder and co-owner Josh Beggs, moved quickly to transform the 142,000-square-foot Sears store for multiple uses, even as several buyers offered to take the building off the new owners' hands, Beggs said.
Magnum Shooting Center, which opened in November 2014 in the northside Polaris Pointe retail center, opened a second location the day after Thanksgiving in 2020 at the former Sears store at Broadmoor Towne Center.
The new Magnum Shooting Center has done well so far; it has more than 30,000 members and outperformed the first year of the north-side location, Beggs said.
Read the full story on The Gazette.
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