Fairlane Town Center being sold again, this time to ‘mall scavenger’ Kohan

Plan includes nding tenant for former Lord & Taylor space

KIRK PINHO

Less than a year after Fairlane Town Center shopping center sold to Centennial Real Estate, the Dallas-based company is selling it to a Long Island-based investor dubbed by some as “the mall scavenger.”

Great Neck, N.Y.-based Kohan Retail Investment Group — which previously owned Eastland Center in Harper Woods along with 4th Dimension Properties LLC — is expected to close on its purchase of the Dearborn mall by the end of the month from Centennial Real Estate, CEO Mike Kohan told Crain’s Tuesday morning.

Kohan said the plan is to keep Fairlane Town Center operating as a mall, add new tenants and bring more foot tra c.

He also said a key goal is nding a new user or users for the Ford Motor Co. o ce space in the former Lord & Taylor department store. “It’s a beautiful o ce building that can de nitely be utilized,” Kohan said.

Time will tell as Kohan Retail has a reputation for letting some of its properties fall into decay.

In recent days, a mall it owns in Presque Isle, Maine, closed due to unpaid electric and water bills, the Bangor Daily News reported. Also recently, a Pennsylvania community took Kohan Retail to court for $185,000 in unpaid sewer and stormwater bills. Last month, a Mississippi judge threatened Kohan with jail time if a blighted o ce building his company owns there isn’t demolished.

Kohan’s malls around the country rack up unpaid taxes, blight violations, go into foreclosure and are otherwise the subject of negative headlines on a regular basis. e company’s website says it owns Michigan malls in Fort Gratiot, Portage, Lansing, Saginaw, Midland, Jackson and Marquette.

“(Fairlane) is not going down that road,” Kohan said.

He admitted to Crain’s that his company has made mistakes in its buying strategy over the 20-plus years he has been in business, but said he has focused on more expensive and stabilized malls the last ve-seven years.

“I bought some malls that were at the point of no return, malls that were 25 percent occupied, there were deferred maintenance issues,” Kohan said. “Unfortunately, I bought those malls and I shouldn’t have because I stepped into somebody else’s problem. I don’t want my reputation to go bad.”

Kohan said Centennial marketed the Fairlane property, drawing his interest.

Centennial declined comment.

Centennial, along with partners New York City-based Waterfall Asset Management LLC and fellow Dallas-based real estate company Cawley Partners, bought the nancially struggling mall in May. Five months later, in October, it bought the former Lord & Taylor department store space.

Centennial’s Chief Investment Ofcer Carl Tash told Crain’s in May that plans were still being made for Fairlane and that the mall has a lot of parking space that could be redeveloped into multifamily housing, such as traditional apartments, senior housing or student units.

Both Fairlane Town Center and e Shops at Willow Bend in Texas had been owned by Miami Beach, Fla.-based Starwood Capital Group before the company fell behind on a $161 million commercial mortgage-backed securities loan and were sent into receivership.

It’s the latest twist for Fairlane, which was built in 1976 and has struggled nancially the past few years.

Starwood purchased Fairlane and the 600,000-square-foot Mall at Partridge Creek in Clinton Township plus ve other malls in 2014 from what was then Taubman Centers Inc. (now Taubman Co. LLC) for $1.4 billion.

Contact: kpinho@crain.com; (313) 446-0412; @kirkpinhoCDB three-bedroom units on St. Aubin Street.

A second project, which the city says has not yet been nalized, would be Harper Woods-based American Community Developers building affordable housing on a Division Street site near the Dequindre Cut for which there was an RFP. Economic Growth Corp., a Rock Island, Ill.based developer, also is working on another project several years out, Carmody said.

Carmody also said the partnership is working on things like the E.W. Grobbel Sons Inc.’s plans for the Grobbel’s Gourmet Fresh Neighborhood Market and a Sy Ginsberg-branded Jewish-style deli later this year at 2456 Market St.; and Ping Ho’s new o shoot of the popular West Village restaurant and butchery Marrow.

“We have a handful of projects, small, medium and large,” Carmody said. “However we can help them as part of their mission (we will).”

West Chester, Ohio-based Pivotal, which would build 53 units of workforce housing with one-, two- and

Contact: kpinho@crain.com; (313) 446-0412; @kirkpinhoCDB

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