Southland Center in Taylor officially has a new owner.

The downriver shopping mall at 23000 Eureka Road near Racho Boulevard sold late last month for close to $51.5 million to an entity called Southland Holdings I LLC, staff in the city assessing office said on Wednesday.

That entity is connected to Greenwood Global Inc., based in the northern Chicago suburb of Glencoe, and former shopping mall executive Alex Berman, according to state business records.

A property transfer affidavit listed the sale as finalizing on Dec. 30, according to city staff.

Southland Center is the latest regional shopping mall to trade hands in the last few years, following Mario Kiezi’s March 2022 purchase of Oakland Mall in Troy and two separate sales of Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, first to Dallas-based Centennial Real Estate in May 2022 and then to Great Neck, N.Y.-based Kohan Retail Investment Group less than a year later in April 2023. 

In a post on the city of Taylor’s Facebook page on Saturday, Amy Jurecki, Southland Center’s senior general manager, is quoted as saying: “This is going to be an exciting new chapter for Southland. We’re really excited about this.”

Following Berman’s purchase of a foreclosed exurban Chicago shopping center in 2015, an article in Crain’s Chicago Business described him as a former executive for what at the time was Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc., most recently known as GGP. The story says he scored a major win in 2012 by flipping a shopping center portfolio for $1.43 billion after leaving GGP in 2009, just before the company filed for bankruptcy. 

Speaking from Europe on Sunday morning, Berman said he is concentrating on driving occupancy at his new downriver shopping center. 

“When people buy malls, it falls into different categories,” Berman said. “Some buy because they want to go through a complete redevelopment because it’s a property that’s on the way down. Some build residential, some build mixed-use. There are also some situations where people try to catch a mall on the way down and generate some cash flow and then see what happens.” 

That’s not the story with Southland Center, he said.

“We like it because we believe it’s a strong mall in a strong market,” Berman continued. “We believe it’s a strong property with strong anchors in Macy’s, JCPenney, Best Buy and Cinemark. We also believe people in the area like the mall. We would like to keep it operational and add some leasing. That’s our strategy.” 

Berman said he and his investors haven’t been focusing on real estate in the last five-plus years, instead concentrating on stocks and bonds, but in the last 18 months or so became interested in malls.

“After COVID, we were curious about retail because we have seen a lot of negative publicity and we believe some of the sentiment is overblown,” Berman said. “We started slowly looking at malls and trying to find something like Southland — a strong property that has a place in the market. This is our first acquisition of this kind in recent history, but I’m hopeful that we’ll like it.” 

The sale caps off a year and a half of struggles for the 905,000-square-foot Southland Center — one of four “directional” malls built by the J.L. Hudson’s department store company, along with Northland Center in Southfield, Westland Center in Westland and Eastland Center in Harper Woods.

In July 2022, Southland Center’s previous owner, Toronto-based Brookfield Properties, defaulted on a $78.75 million Barclays loan from 2012, and the loan’s maturity date was ultimately extended until July 2023. The balance at the time of the sale last month is not known, but as of July it was $61.4 million. 

Southland Center then hit the market for sale in July with Chicago-based brokerage house JLL marketing the property, which opened in 1970. 

According to commercial mortgage-based securities data posted to CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate information service, for the six months ending June 30, the mall had net cash flow of $4.18 million on $8.16 million in revenue and just shy of $4 million in operating expenses and capital expenditures. Net cash flow for 2023 was $9.34 million and $8.93 million in 2022.

However, the mall’s valuation has plunged over the last decade or so, falling from $114.4 million in April 2012 when the Barclays loan was issued to $64.9 million, a 43.3% drop, as of August 2023, per the CoStar CMBS data. 

Brookfield acquired Southland Center in 2016 when it purchased New York City-based Rouse Properties Inc., the mall’s previous owner, in an all-cash deal reportedly valued at $2.8 billion.