Westland Mall in Hialeah is trading for $ 149 million

Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group sold the Westland Mall in Hialeah to a Dallas-based retail real estate company.

Centennial scooped the mall at 1675 West 49th Street by taking on Starwood’s $ 149.4 million mortgage on the property, records show.

Starwood originally took out a $ 160 million loan for the mall in 2017. The current outstanding balance is $ 149.4 million with the German Aareal Bank acting as the lender. Simultaneously with the reallocation of Starwood’s mortgage to Centennial, the two also signed a deed on the property for $ 0, records indicate.

The deal doesn’t cover the entire mall as buildings for a Macy’s, JCPenny, and a closed Sears aren’t part of the sale.

Tenants of the Westland Mall property that have been traded include Bath & Body Works, Pandora, G by Guess, Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Tous and Express Factory Outlet, according to the mall’s website.

The 301,593-square-foot mall, most of which were developed in 1970, is on the northeast corner of Palmetto Expressway and West 49th Street, property records show.

Founded in 1997, directed by Steven Levin, Centennial owns malls and malls across the United States, including Port Charlotte Town Center in Florida, according to its website.

Starwood, headquartered in Miami Beach, is a private investment company founded in 1991 with several subsidiaries and affiliates, including the publicly traded real estate investment firm Starwood Property Trust.

The deal comes at a dubious time for the South Florida retail market.

Although landlords began increasing rents in the third quarter of 2021 to levels that exceeded pre-pandemic levels, most of rental activity has been fueled by restaurants and service-minded tenants, according to a Colliers report.

At the same time, other malls in South Florida have shown signs of problems. The $ 95 million mortgage-backed securities loan for the Westfield Broward Shopping Center in Plantation went into special service in August, showing that owner Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield hadn’t made a payment since April, according to Trepp.

In another instance, the lender took control of Southland Mall in Cutler Bay after previous owner Investcorp defaulted on its $ 65 million CMBS loan in 2020, according to Trepp. Wells Fargo, who represents CMBS investors, won its trial to acquire the mall through a $ 2,600 loan offer or offer for the amount of the debt.

In West Palm Beach, CMBS investor trustees at the Cross County Plaza Mall in April sued for foreclosure on the property after the loan special manager alleged the owner was in arrears with payments. Mall owner Cross County Owner LLC, led by Bernardo Kohn and Paul Pollak, countered in court that there was never any default and that the special administrator had a conflict of interest for failing to disclose that he was both the special administrator and the principal administrator of the loan.

The Westland Mall in Hialeah is not certified in CMBS, according to Trepp.