Marcus & Millichap closed the sale of Hampton Inn Sulphur Springs, a 70-room hotel property in Sulphur Springs, Texas.  

Skyler Cooper, senior vice president investment in the Dallas office, exclusively marketed the property on behalf of the seller, Cox Hospitality Group, LLC, and procured the buyer, a Texas-based private investor with support from Allan Miller and Chris Gomes of the Miller-Gomes Hotel Team of Marcus & Millichap.  

Hampton Inn Sulphur Springs, located at 1202 Mockingbird Lane, is an upper-midscale hotel built in 2010 on approximately 2.5 acres. The 70-room property features an outdoor pool, fitness and business center, on-site retail, breakfast area, and 600 square feet of meeting space. Visible from Interstate 30, the hotel is near downtown Sulphur Springs, the Hopkins County Museum and Heritage Park and the Southwest Dairy Center & Museum. 

Dallas-based Younger Partners Investments acquired a two-property, 288,063-square-foot retail portfolio in McKinney and Longview, Texas, from developer Weber & Company.  

The addition of these properties brings YPI’s portfolio to over 1 million square feet of retail. The acquisition also marks YPI’s expansion into East Texas while strengthening its existing North Texas holdings.

The 137,287-square-foot 380 Towne Crossing is at 2014 W. University Drive, at the northwest corner of US 75 and SH 380 in McKinney. The center is shadow anchored by Super Target and Lowe’s Home Improvement. The center’s occupancy is 98.2%, with a diverse tenant mix including FedEx Office, Buffalo Wild Wings, Leslie’s Pool, Cook Children’s Pediatrics, Storming Crab, Jimmy John’s and Sleep Experts.

The 95.6%-occupied Longview Towne Crossing consists of 150,775 square feet. Located at 3092 N. Eastman Road at the northeast corner of US 259 and Hawkins Parkway, the property’s anchors are PetSmart, Five Below and Old Navy. Target and Kohl’s serve as the center’s shadow anchors. Other tenants include James Avery, Cowboy Chicken, Sport Clips, Ulta Beauty, Crumbl Cookies, Sleep Number and Lane Bryant.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Recent headlines have been filled with bankruptcy announcements, failed mergers and acquisitions and going out of business sales. But the future is expected to be brighter across the retail sector as brands across a variety of industries look to expand.

Closed doors lead to opportunities

In the coming months, tenants like Big Lots, Party City, CVS Pharmacy and Walgreens, among others, will shutter locations across the country, leaving significant vacancies in both the net-lease retail and shopping center markets.

While some of the storefronts are likely to remain vacant for the foreseeable future, opportunistic tenants in growth mode will be quick to identify the most attractive locations and backfill those spaces.

Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, Barnes and Noble, Burlington, Michaels and Haverty’s are among the retail brands that have recently acquired leases as other big box stores go out of business. This strategy has allowed tenants to not only capitalize on high-quality, high-traffic sites, but also solves the challenge of expanding in a low-vacancy market.

As shopping center anchors and big-box retailers continue to explore these opportunities, it’s not quite as easy in the single-tenant net-lease market. Net-lease retailers often have strict construction and branding guidelines, requiring build-to-suit solutions. For example, we wouldn’t see Dutch Bros Coffee explore a former Walgreens property as it looks to identify thousands of new potential locations over the coming years.

Instead, it is more likely that shuttered freestanding and junior box locations will be targeted by tenants with more flexibility, such as independent businesses looking to serve their local consumer base from an upgraded location.

Redevelopment or demolition also becomes an option, especially for sites with good ingress/egress in high-traffic areas. While a vacant CVS Pharmacy won’t solve the physical real estate requirements of a Chick-fil-A, for example, the site itself might justify a tear-down.

2025 and beyond

Over the next several years, thousands of new stores and restaurants are expected to open as retailers look to expand their customer reach.

Quick-service restaurants and convenience stores are among the sectors expanding most aggressively, with Jack In The Box, Slim Chickens, Wawa and Sheetz all targeting massive growth. Discount retailers, like Five Below and Ross Dress For Less, have also announced significant growth plans, as consumers remain cost-conscious. Additionally, retailers that have maintained their footprints in recent years, including Lowe’s and Walmart, have identified now as the time to start growing again.

Will 2025 be a pivotal year for closures and consolidation, or will it instead be a year remembered for substantial growth among established and emerging brands?

Note: Graph above includes a sampling of announced or planned openings and closings beginning in 2025 and may represent long-term plans or estimated counts. Retailers listed twice have announced both significant openings and closings.

Sources: Northmarq Research, various retailer websites, and public news articles; information deemed accurate but not guaranteed, with data gathered in December 2024. Tenants are selected for the Top 100 list based on a combination of factors including but not limited to expansion rate, frequency of investment sale transactions, and brand recognition, and tenants may be added to or removed from future reports; the Top 100 list does not suggest a better or less risky investment.

Lanie Beck is senior director of content and marketing research at Northmarq.

CenterSquare acquired an essential service retail shopping center in Houston.

Windermere Village is a 31,355-square-foot Essential Service Retail (ESR) property located in a prominent retail node at the highway intersection of US290 and FM1960 in Houston.

The center has excellent visibility and benefits from 50,000 cars per day. The property is surrounded by top retailers such as Target, Walmart, Home Depot and Kroger, which combine for over 6 million visitors per year. 

The property features national retailers such as Tropical Smoothie Café, Pure Barre, The Joint Chiropractic, Marco’s Pizza and Edible Arrangements.

An upturn in all commercial real estate sectors, including industrial? That’s what PwC and the Urban Land Institute are predicting in their Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2025 report.

The report points to the Federal Reserve Board’s decision to start lowering interest rates last year. This move should spur an increase in commercial real estate transactions in 2025, according to PwC’s and the Urban Land Institute’s report.

To create their report, the two organizations personally interviewed more than 450 commercial real estate industry experts, including investors, lenders, brokers, advisors and consultants. The Emerging Trends in Real Estate Report also includes survey responses from almost 1,600 people.

As a sign of the optimistic tone of this year’s survey, 65% of respondents rated the chance of their firms being profitable this year as “good” or “excellent.” That’s up from just 41.3% of respondents saying the same in 2024.

This doesn’t mean that 2025 won’t bring challenges. A total of 55% of respondents said that commercial real estate debt markets are still undersupplied for acquisition activity, while 58% said they were undersupplied for refinancing and 75% for development activity.

Respondents, though, were hopeful that economic conditions would continue to improve in 2025. A total of 49.9% of respondents said that they expected inflation to decrease this year, while an additional 1.8% said that they expected it to decrease significantly. A total of 38% of respondents said that they expected inflation to remain stable at current levels throughout this year.

Marcus & Millichap facilitated the sale of Corporate Park Place, a 113,429-square-foot office building in Irving, Texas.  

Ron Hebert and Joseph Jaques, investment specialists in Marcus & Millichap’s Dallas office, exclusively marketed the property on behalf of the seller and procured the buyer, a local 1031 exchange investor, in an all-cash transaction. 

Located at 1333 Corporate Drive, Corporate Park Place is a Class B, multi-tenant office building situated on 6.08 acres. Built in 1980, the property includes 52 office suites with flexible layouts. It is just off the President George Bush Turnpike, two miles from DFW International Airport, and minutes from the Toyota Music Factory.