TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - March 1, 2012) - Primaris Retail REIT (TSX:PMZ-UN.TO - News) is pleased to report positive operating results for the fourth quarter of 2011.These results have been prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS").Prior year's results have been restated to conform to this change.

President and CEO, John Morrison, commented "We are very pleased with our results for 2011.Funds from Operations for the fourth quarter were 16% stronger than our previous quarterly record. We completed a significant $572 million dollar acquisition during the year, establishing Primaris as the third largest and only public enclosed shopping centre owners in the country. In addition to the property acquisitions we added many strong people to our team, both at the property level and at our corporate offices.The strong financial results resulted from acquisitions, strict expense controls at the G&A level, and from seasonal occupancy gains during the fourth quarter.With a prudent financial structure and strong liquidity, Primaris is well positioned for the future."

Highlights

Funds from Operations (FFO)

Net Operating Income (NOI)

Same Properties - Net Operating Income

Net Income

Operations

Liquidity

Financial Results

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Primaris Retail REIT Announces Record Fourth Quarter and Annual Financial Results

SOQUEL - Three years after a devastating fire, brothers Brian and Kevin Dueck are almost ready to open a new commercial development, Retail 41. Their investment: More than $1 million.

While other landlords have vacancies, the Duecks have signed leases for two new businesses, Discretion Brewing and Crossfit Now, and are reviewing proposals from other would-be tenants for units in the 10,500-square-foot space at 2703 41st Ave. across from Home Depot.

"We have three letters of intent, and two more coming in," said Kevin Dueck.

"You never know when you build these things what's going to happen," said Brian Dueck, who helped supervise the construction. "It's good to see people interested in leasing new space in these times."

Offers have come from a furniture store, tanning salon, hair salon and commercial kitchen, according to real estate broker Steve Allen. Only two of the eight spaces are left.

The Dueck family, which own the furniture stores HomeSpace and WorkSpace at this location, debated how to proceed after losing a 20,000-square-foot showroom and warehouse.

The brothers considered rebuilding, then looked at building with a multiple-tenant space, with Swift Street Courtyard and the Sash Mill as inspiration. Finally, they downsized the tenant spaces to increase their affordability.

"If spaces go for $1 a (square) foot, we're going to get more offers than if we're in the $2 range," said Kevin Dueck.

"We went back to the drawing board because of the economy," said Brian Dueck. "We're happy we went that route."

Their asking rate in the $1 range is lower than average rate in the fourth quarter of 2011, which was $1.97 per square foot, according to Cassidy Turley Commercial Real Estate Services.

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Soquel retail complex on 41st Avenue emerges from devastating blaze

Two businesses are poised to open in the retail space left vacant by the closure of Borders in Sand City.

A third business, yet to be identified, is expected to round out the new establishments.

The marketing coordinator for Tilly's, an Irvine-based surf and skate apparel retailer, confirmed Wednesday the company is opening a store in a portion of the empty space.

The marketing coordinator, William Marquis, said the store is slated to open July 3, and the company is opening stores in a number of other new markets this year as well. The company has 120 stores in 11 states.

"We are really excited to be opening in Sand City," he said.

Tilly's, a privately held company that says it caters to "the ever-evolving generation of active lifestyles," also has a new store at Harden Ranch in Salinas, which opened last November.

The Orosco Group is the Monterey company that bought the 25,000 square-foot site in the Edgewater Center after the Borders chain shut down last year.

Patrick Orosco, a vice president, said construction on the site began several weeks ago. He said he couldn't name or confirm the identities of the retailers his company is negotiating with.

"There'll be three tenants, each well suited to the local trade area," he said.

Ulta Beauty is a second business set to open in the old Borders building, said Steve Matarazzo, city administrator of Sand City. The company's website says it was founded as a discount beauty retailer in 1990.

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Sand City to get a skate apparel retailer in former Borders' store

Nationwide Program Provides Unique Employment Opportunity for Veterans

Clearwater, Florida (PRWEB) February 29, 2012

These individuals have risked their lives to defend our country and many soldiers, after returning to civilian life, are coming home to a tough employment outlook and very limited career opportunities, said Marty Juarez, chief operating officer of More Space Place. This program offers these heroes a tangible, exciting, long-term business opportunity, and our hope is that it will help secure a future for their families for many years to come.

As a top-ranked franchise for veterans since 2010, More Space Place offers its franchise owners everything from site selection and showroom design to accounting and on-going product knowledge to get their store off the ground. Today, veterans make up 30 percent of More Space Place owners, currently operating retail stores from the Rockies to the East Coast, and now expanding throughout the United States.

Store owners do not need to have a history in furniture design, cabinetry or prior business ownership through training and support, we will help them develop those skills, said Bob Schmidt, national director of installations and new owner trainer of More Space Place.

To boost employment overall, More Space Place offers a $10,000 initial store discount for qualified, displaced managers who would like to own and operate a retail store.

Most of our store owners have come from a management career completely unrelated to furniture design or construction, creating a melting pot of knowledge and talent. We created a Displaced Managers Plan to further grow our retail stores and build on our existing diverse group of owners, said Clark Williams, president of More Space Place.

For more information about the Veterans Transition Plan, the Displaced Managers Program or franchise ownership please visit: http://www.Top100Franchise.com. For information on More Space Place products and services, please visit: http://www.morespaceplace.com.

About More Space Place

More Space Place has been a national leader in providing revolutionary space-saving furniture for the home, office and garage since 1987. With nearly 40 design centers across the United States, More Space Place helps customers make more room for living by offering innovative products like wall bed (Murphy BedTM) systems, custom closets, home offices and utility cabinetry.

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More Space Place® Offers $15,000 to Veterans Toward a Retail Franchise

Capital Retail Group today announced Body Smith, a fitness and training company serving up workouts to both avid athletes and those new to exercise, has signed a lease to move and expand its business in Logan Circle.

Washington DC (PRWEB) February 28, 2012

Body Smith owner Stuart Smith says, You will find everything you need in a clean, friendly, non-threatening, environment. We will be offering all the amenities of a large club in an inviting, service-oriented, neighborhood gym. Stuart goes on to say, We are excited about expanding our current footprint. It will benefit our potential and existing clients alike.

Robert Tack, CEO of Capital Retail Group partnered with Todd Sherbacow of McBride Real Estate in representing the tenant. Lee Engle and with Street Sense, handled lease negotiations for the landlord. Todd Sherbacow says, The building is perfectly set up for a gym with concrete floors and open space.

Even though the Logan Circle area has several gyms, most are high end with memberships costing at least $130 per month. Body Smith will offer memberships more moderately priced. Says Capital Retail Groups Robert Tack, There will always be demand for a neighborhood gym offering a strong value in the marketplace. He goes on to say, The Powell building is surrounded by an affluent professional population providing Body Smith with the density essential to their success.

About Body Smith

Bodysmith has been the leading innovator in personal fitness training in the Washington, DC area since 1998. From the beginning, we've specialized in functional training methods for our clients, taking them to previously unmatched results in their own personal fitness.

About Capital Retail Group

Capital Retail Group provides a full range of brokerage, property management and strategic advisory services to the commercial retail sector. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and our Blog.

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Residents of Washington DC will have a Gym They can Call Their Own

CHAMPAIGN — Christopher's Fine Jewelry Design in downtown Champaign has closed for remodeling and expects to reopen later this week in a smaller space.

Co-owner Lois Wacholtz said the store plans to keep its frontage at 124 N. Neil St., C, but lease out the back portion.

As for what customers can expect to see once remodeling is done, Wacholtz said: "The windows will stay the same. There will be more wall (display) cases and fewer floor cases, and a fair amount of new inventory when we're up and running."

When complete, the retail space will be about 900 square feet, compared with the 2,000 square feet the store had before, she said.

Wacholtz said she and co-owner Christopher Jupp had been thinking about shrinking the space for a couple years.

"There's no real need to have as much inventory on hand as there used to be," Wacholtz said. "Our focus more and more the last several years has been custom design and custom orders."

Customers love to look at jewelry, she said, "but more and more, they're taking ideas away and having them custom-produced. It just became obvious we didn't need as much display space on hand for inventory."

Wacholtz said she hopes to rent out the back of the building, perhaps for a restaurant.

"We plan to put a doorway in on the Taylor Street side, so it's accessible from that side," she said.

That entrance would be just east of the stairwell that leads down to Christopher's production studio, she added.

Wacholtz said she expects the store to reopen Friday or Saturday, but if customers need Christopher's services before then, they can call.

"We won't be completely finished, but we'll be open by the end of the week again and have out as much as we can," she said.

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Remodeling will make jewelry store smaller

The shell of a 91,146-square-foot retail building is rising on former farmland at 2200 N. Eagle Road, just north of Fairview and the still-unopened Big Al’s entertainment center.

California-based CenterCal, the owner of the project, won’t name the retailers committed to the space. One store will take up about 40,000 square feet, while four split the rest.

The building is valued at $360,000, according to a Meridian building permit.

About 25 stores and restaurants that are new to Idaho are planned for CenterCal's Meridian Town Center site, said CenterCal founder and CEO Fred Bruning.

The center will include water fountains, whimsical sculptures, children's play areas, interconnected streets and walkways with mature landscaping, Bruning said.

Burning says he has commitments from tenants for about 73 percent of the space. “That’s as well as we would have done before the recession,” he said.

By 2013, the company says, the project will add 400,000 square feet of new shopping, entertainment and eateries to the Treasure Valley. It is expected to be built out by 2014.

The first building to open at the center will be Big Al’s. It's a two-story, 66,000-square-foot bowling center, sports bar and arcade. It's been under construction since August and is set to open next August. Big Al's says the center will add 180 jobs to the Treasure Valley.

Immediately to the east of the CenterCal project, Meridian's $25 million Julius M. Kleiner Park is under construction, too. Designed to offer a peaceful urban retreat, the park will feature a plaza, band shell, amphitheater, arboretum and rose garden, ponds, public art, recreation complex, picnic areas, paths and open space.

A 14,000-square-foot senior center inside the park is nearing completion. It's scheduled to open this spring.

The park was once a dairy farm owned and operated by Julius Kleiner, who died in 1972.

Sandra Forester: 377-6464

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Retail building goes up at Meridian Town Center

A plan to build 2 million square feet of office and retail space in Mission Bay as a headquarters for tech giant Salesforce has been suspended, a company spokesman said Monday.

Rapid growth within the company was said to be the main reason for the delay.

Salesforce, a cloud computing company, said in a statement it added 500 more employees in the past year, far exceeding expectations.

The company also said plans to continue hiring locally and globally. An estimated 3,000 employees are based in The City, and Salesforce expects that to grow to 5,000 in the next few years.

That growth, the company said, is one reason Salesforce signed an 18-year, $339 million lease for 400,000 square feet of space at 50 Fremont St. in downtown. But now the company said it likely needs more space as it continues to grow.

“It is clear to us that our original Mission Bay strategy may not provide enough space and flexibility for our needs,” the company said. “This means we are suspending development on our Mission Bay campus and instead focusing on further expansion of our downtown San Francisco campus.”

The Mission Bay campus, which was approved in January, called for construction on 14 acres within the Mission Bay redevelopment zone. Residential housing in Mission Bay is still slated to continue, and UC San Francisco’s hospital complex is progressing toward its 2014 completion date.

Though Salesforce would have been a major component of Mission Bay, Mayor Ed Lee’s office -- which has been a big supporter of luring tech companies to San Francisco -- said it’s committed to working with the company.

“They’re a rapidly expanding high-tech company,” mayoral spokeswoman Christine Falvey said. “They’re a company people look at when others try to figure out where to headquarter. The mayor is committed to working with them in downtown and in Mission Bay.”

akoskey@sfexaminer.com

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Salesforce backs out of Mission Bay campus

By  Tim Feran

The Columbus Dispatch Sunday February 26, 2012 9:54 AM

FILE PHOTO

Circuit City closed 567 stores when the consumer-electronics chain was liquidated in 2009. Other retailers have moved into those vacant stores to improve their markets.

 The number of vacant stores in Columbus could reach a five-year low in 2012, but the reasons don’t exactly add up to good news.

 The prediction is included in a report, by Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, which attributes the shrinking vacancies to several factors. Tops among them: Retailers are still slowly filling up space that was built before the recession.

At the same time, the report says, construction of new retail space is expected to remain well below the historical average.

Right now, real-estate companies are focused on filling spaces vacated by other retailers, said Erin Patton, director of the national retail group for Marcus & Millichap.

 “That’s really a trend you’ll see nationwide,” Patton said. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because of the market we’re coming out of. We lost a lot of different stores, a lot of concepts, that couldn’t keep up with their rent. It’s a very good thing to stabilize the retail real-estate market.”

The expectation of below-average new construction doesn’t surprise one commercial real-estate veteran.

“Columbus is actually kind of over-retailed,” said Rob Click, senior managing director of CBRE Brokerage Services. “We have a very significant amount of retail space for our population. The number of bodies can just support only so much retail.”

Many of the large retailers that recently signed leases in central Ohio have chosen areas with healthy population growth and relatively high household incomes, including Polaris, Easton and Westerville.

Last week, for example, the outdoor retailer Cabela’s announced that it will open an 80,000-square-foot store — its first in Ohio — in the Polaris area.

“The biggest impact is going to be the Cabela’s deal recently announced,” Click said. “That’s probably the single biggest retail addition that’s going to happen this year.”

Grocer Earth Fare’s move into a 30,000-square-foot space at the Gemini Place Towne Center in Polaris will be another confirmation that the neighborhood is one of the top retail areas in Columbus, Patton said.

The Marcus & Millichap report says that the home-improvement retailer

Menard’s move into a 240,000-square-foot space at the site of the former Northland Mall last year should help revitalize the Morse Road corridor. It also notes that a WalMart opening in Westerville by midyear should increase traffic in that area, too. Both moves should attract smaller tenants to vacant spaces nearby.

The large number of vacancies that arose as Circuit City, Linens ’n Things and other chains closed stores led other retailers, including discounters, to move up to better locations, the report says, adding that . that trend should continue, albeit at a slower pace.

“It was a very opportunistic time for Big Lots or

Ollie’s, among others, to gain market share,” Patton said. “There are still opportunities out there for players who want to do it. The vacancy rate is still fairly high.”

tferan@dispatch.com

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Regional retailing vacancies fill slowly

Last Updated: February 27, 2012 12:05pm ET

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Only about 300,000 square feet
of retail space will come online
in Charlotte in 2012.

CHARLOTTE—Slowly recovering, that’s the word on the retail front in Charlotte, according to the Marcus & Millichap’s 2012 Market Outlook.

Limited construction and large lease signings will allow the Charlotte metro to post positive absorption in 2012, M&M predicts. Meanwhile, the firm expects multi-tenant velocity to pick up thanks to out-of-state sellers handing off stabilized shopping centers and risk-averse buyers targeting single-tenant properties.

“With little movement on the development front, smart owners of existing centers are utilizing capital to retain signature tenants and attract new retail concepts,” Susan McGuire, principal at CNL Crosland, tells GlobeSt.com. “They are making their asset stronger and working with tenants to ‘right-size’ their space.”

Indeed, only about 300,000 square feet of retail space will come online in Charlotte in 2012, expanding the inventory by a meager 0.3 percent, M&M reports. Vacancy rates will dip 60 basis points to 8.4% in 2012 while rents climb 1.6% to $17.56 per square foot.

M&M predicts institutional operators looking to reposition assets will list performing shopping centers with a national anchor and solid tenant roster at cap rates near 7.5% while REITs and private buyers seeking higher cash-on cash returns will finance these investment-grade products to expand their portfolios.

Finally, as conditions tighten, owners will invest in minor upgrades to facilitate higher rents over the next five years, according to Marcus & Millichap’s report. At the same time, the firm expects 1031-exchange buyers to disperse their equity into single-tenant buildings near major transit corridors as a hedge against inflation.

For more thought leadership from Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, check out "StreetSmart," a blog by Hessam Nadji, the firm's managing director of research and advisory services. The blog provides Thought Leadership positions on a variety of commercial real estate-related issues. Click here to watch Nadji on CNBC's "Realty Check" program talking about multifamily and the housing crash. For more information on the Thought Leadership program, contact Scott Thompson at sthompson@alm.com.

Categories: Southeast, Retail, Acquisitions/Dispositions, Development, Leasing, Marcus & Millichap, Analysis, Charlotte

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Charlotte Retail Sector Continues Slow Recovery