The owners of The Pruneyard in Campbell have wrapped up the first of four phases to revamp and expand the mixed-use shopping center, adding a list of new restaurants and shops as longtime tenants begin to reopen.
Since San Francisco-based Ellis Partners purchased the property in December 2014, the group has wrapped up lease deals for the more than 250,000-square-foot center totaling about 140,500 square feet. Today, the center, at roughly at 1875 S. Bascom Ave., is more than 90 percent leased with a carefully curated mix of tenants, said Caroline Morris, partner and senior vice president of asset management at Ellis Partners.
“It’s not about advertising the center and talking to whoever has interest,” she said. “It is really going out and contacting specific tenants and convincing them to come to our center. That has been the most challenging and interesting and rewarding part of what we do.”
Of the leases signed in recent years, 110,000 square feet was renewal, extension or reconfiguration deals to keep existing tenants. The remaining 30,500 square feet of new deals include a slew of new restaurants and shops, including a handful slated to open this spring. Among them:
V’s Barbershop has recently opened in suite 148 and offers both traditional barbershop services like haircuts and beard trims, to more full-service options like massages and facials
The Trader Joe’s on the site has also seen an expansion, while the Rock Bottom Brewery is slated to see renovations of its own in the near future.
The announcement of the newest retailers to come to the center comes a little more than a year after Ellis Partners started rehabbing the old shopping center, which hadn’t seen a facelift in about two decades. The group officially broke ground in February 2017 and are finishing the last bits of cleanup now on what was a challenging project, Ellis said.
“Any renovation of an old property is difficult and we’ve had lots of interesting surprises occur during that renovation process,” he said. “You have to be willing to change your plans quickly when you encounter conditions you didn’t know existed.”
Not only that, but the construction contributed to dwindling foot traffic in the past year, making the project a challenge not just for the developer, but for tenants.
“During the construction, it was a lot of disruption and I think a lot of customers stayed away from the center for about nine months,” Jim Ellis, managing principal for Ellis Partners said in an interview late last week.
But since the group has all but wrapped up the total renovation of the center, foot traffic has picked up, he said. Retailers that have opened or re-opened at The Pruneyard recently have said business is good.
The group won’t have sales data to back that up for a few more months, Morris said, but anecdotally, the group is happy with the results.
“It gets busier every day,” she said.
