Michael Sanchez likes turning big boxes into smaller ones.
“We’re not the ones coming up with theories. We just lean into what’s happening,” he said.
Sanchez is chief operating officer of Las Vegas-based Rhino Investments, a retail real estate firm with holdings from Michigan to California. Last week, it spent $3.5 million on the 138,000-square-foot former Macy’s connected to the Southwest Plaza mall near Littleton.
Macy’s had listed the building at 8501 W. Bowles Ave. in unincorporated Jefferson County for $7.2 million in 2023.
Sanchez already has a tenant identified for the top floor of the two-story building. He declined to identify it but said it is “experiential” in the same vein as a Dave & Busters or an escape room, where “you’re not shopping, you’re experiencing.”
The first floor of the building will either be chopped up into smaller units or reserved for a single tenant, depending on interest.
Macy’s closed the store in 2020, switching it to a fulfillment center where customers could pick up or return online orders. It had been vacant since the start of the year, according to Erik Christopher of SRS Real Estate Partners, who helped broker the deal for Macy’s with colleague Hillary Kolber and is now marketing the first-floor space.
Macy’s sold its Southwest Plaza space for less than half the $8 million it received for its space within The Shops at Northfield in 2023. It is set to be replaced by Wayfair.
Sanchez said putting new users in a former big box-store can be challenging.
“You’ve got to be very mindful about what the use is, and you don’t want to get into very complex demising structures because they become very, very expensive to develop,” he said.
Public records show Rhino Investments took out a $13.7 million, one-year loan from Ignite Funding, which fashions itself as a “a lender for short-term projects with clear exit strategies,” according to its website. Sanchez said his company’s philosophy is generally to sell within three years of buying a property.
Rhino has a relationship with Macy’s, he added. The company has already bought one former store elsewhere and has another under contract. This is the firm’s second Colorado acquisition, the other being an 88,000-square-foot shopping center in Pueblo.
Sanchez said he doesn’t see the success of his space as dependent on the performance of the broader Southwest Plaza mall.
“At the end of the day, we are doing things to draw people to the mall itself. Whether they decide to go inside, certainly their prerogative, but we’re not dependent on that,” Sanchez said.
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