HARLINGEN — A major hospital company has agreed to take over 20,000 square feet of empty space at Valle Vista mall.
California-based Prime Healthcare, which operates Harlingen Medical Center, Knapp Medical Center in Weslaco and Mission Regional Medical Center, will consolidate current back-office operations at two sites at the new mall location.
Raudel Garza, chief executive officer of the Harlingen Economic Development Corp., says the HEDC has been working for some time to facilitate the deal.
“Prime Healthcare has been in Harlingen for a while,” Garza said Monday. “Their back-office operation and some other support staff for essentially Harlingen Medical Center and Knapp and the Mission hospital, those are the three in the Valley.”
“But they also do some of the work for other hospitals in their network, their system, and they’ve been kind of spread out over two different facilities over the last few years,” he added. “They’re trying to consolidate everybody under one roof, and finally decided to pull the trigger and lease out 20,000 square feet at Valle Vista mall.”
The space Prime Healthcare will take over is located between the Dillard’s and Sears spaces. Both of those retailers closed their operations at the mall, Dillard’s in June and Sears early in 2019.
Initially the new mall medical office space will bring in 162 employees already working at the two Harlingen sites. But Garza said the plan is to increase staffing at the mall offices to “well over 200 jobs over the next five years.”
He said staffers for Prime Healthcare are paid $14 or $15 per hour on average.
Troubled 651,000-square-foot Valle Vista, like scores of traditional malls across the country, has hit hard times over the past few years, losing dozens of retail stores and struggling to fill empty spaces.
But mall owners the Kohan Retail Investment Group of New York, which purchased Valle Vista for $12.5 million in 2018, have been fulfilling their promise to diversify the property away from traditional retail space.
In October, they announced the 106,000-square-foot space which used to house Dillard’s department store had been leased to the development firm BH Properties.
Previously, the fast-growing business services firm TaskUs assumed space in the mall, and the empty Sears store site was taken by a Dallas development company in 2020.
“Prime Healthcare and TaskUs are both back-office operations which are going to have a steady flow of people coming in other than to shop,” Garza said. “It’s going to bode well for the food court and even for some of the shops there, because these folks are going to start looking around and then stopping in on the retailers that are there, whether it’s before work or after work or on their breaks.”
Prime Healthcare officials did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday, but it is anticipated they will move into their new space sometime early next year.
“They’ve got to do some tenant improvements, and I assume that those tenant improvements typically take anywhere from 60 to 120 days, so we’re probably looking at sometime toward the end of the first quarter next year,” Garza said.
