Westfield walks away from downtown San Francisco mall

The house owners of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall have stopped paying their mortgage and are giving up the property to lenders, including to deepening actual property ache in a metropolis struggling to convey again employees and vacationers after the pandemic.

The mall, co-owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield Corp., has $558 million in excellent mortgage debt. Administration might be turned over to a receiver.

The transfer comes a month after Nordstrom Inc. stated it was closing its retailer on the web site, citing a drop in buyer site visitors and the altering dynamics of the town.

The mall is within the coronary heart of San Francisco’s Union Sq. district, one of many downtown’s fundamental buying and vacationer areas. Westfield San Francisco Centre is the town’s largest buying middle and options the historic Emporium division retailer dome, rebuilt after San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake and painstakingly restored for the mall’s 2008 opening.

“Given the difficult working situations in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in gross sales, occupancy and foot site visitors, now we have made the tough choice to start the method to switch administration of the buying middle to our lender to permit them to nominate a receiver to function the property going ahead,” Molly Morse, a spokesperson for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, stated within the assertion.

San Francisco has been among the many hardest-hit cities for the reason that pandemic as workplace vacancies soar, retail vacancies rise and issues about security deter guests. Final week, Park Inns & Resorts Inc. stated it was stopping funds on loans tied to 2 downtown motels with $725 million in excellent debt.

Gross sales on the Westfield San Francisco Centre fell to $298 million final yr from $455 million in 2019, whereas foot site visitors dropped 43%, Morse stated. Site visitors and gross sales at different Westfield properties elevated throughout the identical interval.

Westfield’s choice to cease paying its debt was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a press release, San Francisco Mayor London Breed stated the transfer was “coming for a while” and pointed to plans by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield to go away the U.S. market totally. The Paris-based firm deliberate a “radical discount of our monetary publicity to the U.S. over the course of 2022 and 2023,” Chief Govt Jean-Marie Tritant has stated.

The corporate final yr bought the Westfield Santa Anita mall for $537.5 million to Southern California actual property investor Wen Shan Chang, who modified the Arcadia buying middle’s title to the Outlets at Santa Anita. It was the biggest mall sale in years.

“With new administration, we could have a chance to pursue a brand new imaginative and prescient for this house that focuses on what the way forward for downtown San Francisco may be,” Breed stated. “Whether or not that’s attracting new kinds of enterprise or academic establishments, or creating a very totally different expertise, we should be open to what’s attainable.”