HARLINGEN — The owners of the city’s premier mall say they intend to dump the property on lenders, apparently conceding profits from the mall will not meet expectations.
City officials, however, expect new ownership will keep the 650,504-square-foot retail mall open.
“With the continued growth of the Harlingen economy, this news is welcomed,” Mayor Chris Boswell said in a statement. “What has been reported is that Washington Prime borrowed too much money against the Harlingen property, but during their ownership the lease revenues continued to perform reasonably.
“This transition provides an opportunity for Valle Vista Mall to catch up with the rest of the retail community in Harlingen,” he added.
Washington Prime Group is a real estate trust, or REIT, a financial vehicle which invests in real estate through property or mortgages and often trades on major exchanges as a stock.
The financial problems with Valle Vista have been known for some time, and the mall has been aggressively trying to fill empty spots which have numbered as high as 19 storefronts.
Washington Prime’s problem has been its inability to resolve a troubled $40 million loan used to purchase Valle Vista back in 2014.
The success of malls like Valle Vista and others is, financially speaking, determined by what is called the debt-to-yield ratio. That is a formula for net operating income of a mall or other property divided by mortgage debt times 100.
Last year, Valle Vista’s debt yield ratio was 9.0 percent, which is generally regarded as acceptable in a primary market but seen as an underperformer in a small market like Harlingen.
Which is why Washington Prime lumped Valle Vista with four other malls it owns in Iowa, Virginia, Florida and Ohio as being underperforming, according to a Morningstar report in February 2016.
City officials yesterday pointed out that whatever troubles Valle Vista may have, slow sales at the mall have not dragged down the rest of the city’s healthy retail sector.
This year, the city has seen consistent monthly rises in sales tax revenue and is up 3.81 percent over the previous year.
“This transaction opens the door for a huge opportunity for commercial growth in Harlingen,” said Raudel Garza, chief executive of the Harlingen Economic Development Corp. “It is unfortunate to see a retail property in a prime location gradually decline, while surrounding retail continues to thrive.”
Valle Vista has long marketed itself and its location where two major interstates, I-2 and I-69E/U.S. 77, come together. Population within a 45-minute drive of the mall is 1.1 million.
Valle Vista, to be sure, is not the nation’s only troubled mall property.
In the past several years, only one major new retail mall has been built, a sign developers and lenders are wary of financial risks connected with brick-and-mortar retail sites.
Even as the overall economy strengthened in 2016, delinquency rates for loans backing retail property rose by 0.6 percent to 5.76 percent nationally, according to real estate data service Trepp LLC.
Special servicers, who deal with troubled commercial mortgage securities, managed $3.1 billion worth of mall-backed loans last year, up from $2.9 billion in 2015, according to Trepp.
Valle Vista’s loan, serviced through J.P. Morgan/Chase Commercial Mortgage Securities Corp., reportedly was added to that special servicing pool a year ago.
Washington Prime is believed to have made its last payment on their debt for Valle Vista in May when the loan matured. It has been reported the company did not seek to refinance the loan balance.
Douglas Snyder, general manager for Valle Vista Mall, declined to comment for this story.
