New York REIT flipping huge shopping, office campus in Wilton

http://www.thehour.com/business/article/New–York-REIT-flipping-huge-shopping-office-10989820.php

By Alexander Soule

Published 1:22 pm, Thursday, March 9, 2017

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The names clustered in quaint Wilton Center roll off the tongue like a mini who’s who in consumer products and retail, both big brands like Blue Buffalo and Stop Shop and local favorites like Sweet Pierre’s and the Toy Chest.

Now, it is Wilton Center itself that is for sale — the main aisle, anyway.

Just four years after acquiring Wilton River Shopping Center, Kimco Realty is quietly soliciting buyers for the big plaza at the town’s figurative crossroads just off Route 7, as well as the adjacent Wilton Campus office complex that has additional storefronts including the town’s lone movie theater.

Combined, Wilton River Park adds up to nearly 300,000 square feet of space with dozens of tenants, most prominently Stop Shop and the pet food maker Blue Buffalo Pet Products, whose headquarters occupies about 40,000 square feet of space. The complex is also home of the Wilton Bow Tie Cinema 4 movie theater.

First Selectman Lynne Vanderslice said she has reached out to prominent retail property operators in the area to alert them of the opportunity to purchase Wilton River Park Shopping Center.

With nearly 525 properties nationally, New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Kimco Realty is accustomed to the law of big numbers, many of them open-air shopping centers like Wilton River Park Shopping Center. At present, the Wilton campus is one of just 16 positioned for “disposition” on a company website.

Kimco spent $82 million in 2013 to purchase Wilton River Park from an entity controlled by Al Kleban, chairman of Kleban Properties in Fairfield, who had originally constructed the complex in the 1980s.

“It has a lot of small businesses, mom-and-pop kind of businesses that (requires) a unique owner,” Vanderslice said. “Al Kleban was. He was very hands-on and involved in the community. If you look at (Kimco’s) portfolio, it’s not the kind of property they have.”

Kimco is led by Milton Cooper, the company’s executive chairman who co-founded Kimco in 1958 and became a legendary figure in the real estate investment trust, or REIT, industry; and CEO Conor Flynn, a graduate of Yale University. In a February conference call, Flynn told investors the company has positioned properties for sale to focus on “major metro” markets, in his words.

“We were able to divest assets at an opportune time when (interest) rates were hovering near all-time lows and demand for open-air centers was at an all-time high,” Flynn said in February. “We have seen certain private buyers exercise a level of caution over the past few months, especially as interest rates have risen … during that time frame.”

Like other real estate investment trusts, s of Kimco have dropped since last summer amid ongoing difficulties by retail chains, with several bankruptcies having been announced this year. Currently, a third of the storefronts in Wilton River Park’s Stop Shop campus are vacant, the largest at about 1,400 square feet of space and occupying a visible perch on River Road.

— Stephanie Kim and Pat Tomlinson contributed to this report.

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