Former Midtown Center Wal-Mart For Sale

An anchor property at the Midtown Center shopping complex will hit the market next month.

The former Wal-Mart store will be auctioned off starting on June 20. The starting bid is set at $825,000.

The listing for the vacant store, which sits on a 15.24-acre parcel just northeast of the intersection of N. 60th St. and W. Capitol Dr., touts its potential to be used again as a big-box store.

“161,022 square foot anchor tenant retail property in the highly trafficked Midtown Center,” says the posting on auction service Ten-X. “Features excellent building and pylon signage visible to the 18,987 vehicles passing by on 60th Street.” It also touts traffic volumes on nearby W. Fond du Lac Ave.

But one need only look across the large surface parking lot to see what the future might hold. Starting in 2018, Phoenix Investors converted the vacant, 134,314-square-foot Lowe’s home improvement store into a distribution center. It is now leased to Sellars Absorbent Materials.

An auxiliary benefit of Phoenix’s purchase and redevelopment was the ability to parcel out the oversized parking lot for at least one outlot tenant in the future, an opportunity that the Wal-Mart property also presents. Boulder Venture has successfully executed that strategy with a former Home Depot on W. Good Hope Rd., recently securing approval to replace the former garden center with a Planet Fitness.

The Wal-Mart property, technically addressed as 5825 W. Hope Ave., includes three loading docks and a 500-space parking lot. It was constructed in 2002 and renovated in 2006. The national retailer closed the store in 2016 along with three suburban stores and 265 others across the globe. Pick ‘n Save is the largest remaining retailer at Midtown Center.

The big-box property, like most of the mall complex, is owned by an affiliate of New York-based DLC Management Corp. The shopping center specialist paid $47.2 million for the shopping center complex in 2014.

The Wal-Mart property is assessed for $4.7 million, down from a high in 2009 of $15.9 million. Phoenix paid $1.5 million for the Lowe’s store in 2016 when it was assessed for $4 million.

The auction is listed with Mid-America Real Estate brokers Dan Rosenfeld and Emily Gadomski.