Old Target store demands creative thinking

Like an artist at work, Gary Johnson is

looking at the materials at hand and envisioning

how he might craft them into

something new.

For Johnson, the material at hand is a

107,000-square-foot store at Moana and

Kietzke Lane, a building that was home to

a Target store until the store

moved further south along

Virginia Street this summer.

Johnson, a senior vice

president with Colliers

International in Reno, has

the unenviable job of finding

a new tenant for the space

He doesn't kid himself

that it's an easy sell.

"This is one of the tougher ones," he

said. "You have to be creative."

He's aware, too, that the effects of the

leasing decisions on the old Target building

will ripple through neighboring commercial

properties.

The most important thing he can do,

Johnson explained last week, is to use leasing

to establish a theme for the Kietzke

Plaza center that includes the Target site.

Here's how a theme works:

A few years back, Johnson began leasing

the Smithridge Center at the corner of

South Virginia and McCarran Boulevard.

The center had a high vacancy rate, but its

tenants included a Toys R Us store.

From that, Johnson envisioned a center

focused on children, and the center today

includes stores such as Chuck E Cheese's

and Soccer Edge.

At Kietzke Plaza, Johnson's vision might

arise from the neighborhood demographics,

which are increasingly Hispanic.

It's possible, he said, that the old Target

store might be developed into a Hispanicflavored

supermarket a mercado with

neighboring retailers taking their cue from

the primary lease.

That possibility is particularly intriguing,

he said, because traffic along U.S. 395

at Moana Lane is more than 98,000 cars a

day. That raises the potential of creating a

store that would draw Hispanic shoppers

from throughout the region.

Other possibilities that have been kicked

around include development of an indoor

flea market or creation of a large nightclub

in the property built in 1977.

Neither of those possibilities, however,

would generate the seven-day daytime

pedestrian traffic so important to other

retailers in the center.

"That building controls the shopping

center," he said.

Johnson has similar misgivings about

proposals to turn the store into office space

or a call center.

Traditional big-box retailers are unlikely

to lease the space, Johnson said, because

most already are represented in the market.

Then, too, the old Target store no

longer is on the edge of the city's growth

pattern.

Still, Johnson said, he thinks sometimes

that the building might be the right size for

a medium-sized-box user say, a sporting

goods retailer looking to enter the market.

On the other hand, a retailer looking to

take only a portion of the space a half,

maybe probably would want to have a

strong voice in the type of store that occupies

the other half of the building. For a

leasing agent, that's a mixed blessing the

joy of a lease on a half building, the

headache of an increasingly more constrained

search for a tenant for the other

side.

With some visions of possible futures

for the store and neighboring retail center

in hand, the Colliers International official

began calling potential users of the space

"dialing for dollars" in the language of

brokers.

Four or five potential tenants have been

taking a good look at the building in recent

weeks, Johnson said.