by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
When commercial real estate honcho Walter Dickinson had lunch with Donn Carr, the manager of The Avenues Mall, this week, the conversation — as you might expect — rallied back and fourth between cheerleading for Jacksonville business and actual business.
Both men are encouraged by what they see as a burgeoning upscale community that is prime for what Carr called “the right kind of growth,” and there’s no better indicator of that than the total amount of people who are wading through the sea of khaki chinos and boot-cut blue jeans at Banana Republic.
“We’ve got at least 10 super high-end stores that are on the waiting list to get into the Avenues,” said Carr, whose job it is to fill the 1.2 million square feet of leasable area on the Southside. “You’re going to see a major ramp-up at the mall starting next year.”
So for Dickinson and others who earn their living by selling property for companies to do business, that’s a good sign.
“Jacksonville has more money than it did 20 or 25 years ago — a lot more,” said Walter Dickinson, president of Colliers Dickinson, which sells and leases commercial properties all over the city. “And it’s important for us to know what level we’re talking about so that we can steer our efforts in the right direction.”
The cost to lease space at the Avenues has risen from $300 per square-foot to $500 per square-foot during the six years Carr has been there. And they’ve also made the shift from having a Kmart feel to having a Pottery Barn feel. In other words, the Avenues reflects the income level of the people who shop there.
“When I arrived at the Avenues, there was major upscale growth emerging on the south side of town,” said Carr. “But all the people in Ponte Vedra were doing their shopping at the beach or by catalog.”
That was in 1996. In a typical case of supply catching up to demand, Carr set out on a mission to raise the Avenues to the level where wealthy Ponte Vedra Beach residents would want to make the trek westward in their BMWs to buy stainless steel kitchen supplies and cashmere socks.
High-end retail shops travel in packs. Williams Sonoma, the upscale houseware store won’t enter a mall unless there’s a Banana Republic. Talbots, the clothing store, thinks the same way.
According to Carr, those shops are called bell-cow tenants — once they are in place the rest of the heard will follow. So, the challenge for any mall manager is to land those key tenants.
“Once you get two or three of those signature tenants, then there’s a domino effect,” said Carr. “But the hard part is getting two or three.”
Today, the Avenues has four of those signature tenants. Couple that with the focus groups, research projects and surveys they conducted to find out what rich people like to buy and suddenly you’ve got a sold-out mall. According to Carr, the Avenues is completely maxed out of space and even the kiosks in the walkways usually are rented.
About 50,000 people a day visit the Avenues, which is owned by Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group, the largest mall owner in the nation. The Avenues was built in 1988.
Carr described Simon as foward-thinking and constantly developing new revenue streams around their core competency — recruiting and managing retail stores.
One example was the other reason why Carr and Dickinson had lunch. Four years ago, after a complete revamping of the janitorial and maintenance staff at the Avenues based on systems to improve customer service, Simon started Control Building Services, which outsources things like landscaping, heating and air conditioning and janitorial services for all kinds commercial properties and other malls.
“We realized that we had some of the best customer service in the state,” said Carr. “So we decided to offer our services to malls and other buildings that were struggling with that.”
Control Building Services can also bring a commercial property up to vanilla box standard — which means gutted, freshly painted and ready for a new tenant. So, having a meeting with the head of a commercial real estate firm couldn’t hurt.
The janitorial staff at the Avenues wears black pants, white shirts, and black suspenders. They all wear name tags which also include the city where they are from. Remind you of Walt Disney World?
“It’s the Disney World philosophy,” said Carr. “And it works.”
Carr walks around with mall gift certificates in his pocket; if a mall worker is being extra good, they get a prize.
Carr also manages what’s called the Retail Development Division of The Avenues Mall, which utilizes the incubator concept to help people convert cottage industries into mall attractions. One recent example is golf “kits” developed by a local golf pro. If you’ve got an idea that the Avenues likes, they will set you up in a kiosk in the mall to see if your idea takes off.
“And if it doesn’t the damage is pretty minimal,” said Carr.
So all of this is making the Avenues a major force in town and contemplating growth. They own the 3.6 acres directly behind them and a parcel about the size of a large parking lot at the intersection of Southside Boulevard and Philips Highway.
“And of course we could always go vertical,” Carr said. “But that’s very expensive.”
There are plans in the works for a new high-end mall on J. Turner Butler Boulevard that will be mixed-use, meaning retail on the bottom and residential on the top.
Carr contributed Jacksonville’s growth to an aggressive mayor and a supportive City Council, and an economic development authority that is “second to none.”
“They have done such a great job of handpicking the types of businesses that help build successful upscale communities,” said Carr. “And that helps everyone.”
Carr started his career as a buyer for a men’s fashion store in New York and has worked at Dillard’s, Banana Republic and even Dale Carnegie, the didactic sales-training firm out of Phoenix, before joining Simon.
Dickinson said Carr was “bullish” about getting the high quality shops to Jacksonville that help our image as an upscale community.
“Managing a mall is like managing a city,” said Carr. “You’ve got the customers who are like the citizens, the tenants who are like the taxpayers, and security who are like police.” He said that if someone has a bad experience in one store, then they feel like they have had a bad experience at the Avenues. That’s another reason why he keeps gift certificates on hand. Carr joked, “You’ve got to keep your citizens happy.”