Like an artist at work, Gary Johnson is
looking at the materials at hand and envisioning
how he might craft them into
something new.
For Johnson, the material at hand is a
107,000-square-foot store at Moana and
Kietzke Lane, a building that was home to
a Target store until the store
moved further south along
Virginia Street this summer.
Johnson, a senior vice
president with Colliers
International in Reno, has
the unenviable job of finding
a new tenant for the space
He doesn't kid himself
that it's an easy sell.
"This is one of the tougher ones," he
said. "You have to be creative."
He's aware, too, that the effects of the
leasing decisions on the old Target building
will ripple through neighboring commercial
properties.
The most important thing he can do,
Johnson explained last week, is to use leasing
to establish a theme for the Kietzke
Plaza center that includes the Target site.
Here's how a theme works:
A few years back, Johnson began leasing
the Smithridge Center at the corner of
South Virginia and McCarran Boulevard.
The center had a high vacancy rate, but its
tenants included a Toys R Us store.
From that, Johnson envisioned a center
focused on children, and the center today
includes stores such as Chuck E Cheese's
and Soccer Edge.
At Kietzke Plaza, Johnson's vision might
arise from the neighborhood demographics,
which are increasingly Hispanic.
It's possible, he said, that the old Target
store might be developed into a Hispanicflavored
supermarket a mercado with
neighboring retailers taking their cue from
the primary lease.
That possibility is particularly intriguing,
he said, because traffic along U.S. 395
at Moana Lane is more than 98,000 cars a
day. That raises the potential of creating a
store that would draw Hispanic shoppers
from throughout the region.
Other possibilities that have been kicked
around include development of an indoor
flea market or creation of a large nightclub
in the property built in 1977.
Neither of those possibilities, however,
would generate the seven-day daytime
pedestrian traffic so important to other
retailers in the center.
"That building controls the shopping
center," he said.
Johnson has similar misgivings about
proposals to turn the store into office space
or a call center.
Traditional big-box retailers are unlikely
to lease the space, Johnson said, because
most already are represented in the market.
Then, too, the old Target store no
longer is on the edge of the city's growth
pattern.
Still, Johnson said, he thinks sometimes
that the building might be the right size for
a medium-sized-box user say, a sporting
goods retailer looking to enter the market.
On the other hand, a retailer looking to
take only a portion of the space a half,
maybe probably would want to have a
strong voice in the type of store that occupies
the other half of the building. For a
leasing agent, that's a mixed blessing the
joy of a lease on a half building, the
headache of an increasingly more constrained
search for a tenant for the other
side.
With some visions of possible futures
for the store and neighboring retail center
in hand, the Colliers International official
began calling potential users of the space
"dialing for dollars" in the language of
brokers.
Four or five potential tenants have been
taking a good look at the building in recent
weeks, Johnson said.
