Bid of nearly $9.8 million buys West Park Mall

Cape Girardeau’s West Park Mall was sold Wednesday afternoon to an unidentified buyer who submitted a high bid of $9,772,222 in an online auction.

The 40-year-old shopping center was most recently owned by LNR Partners of Miami Beach, Florida.

An additional transaction fee, paid to the organizers of the auction, will bring the total purchase price to $9,940,972. The sale includes the mall’s 68-acre lot, but excludes the J.C. Penney store inside the mall, which is under separate ownership.

It is unclear how many bidders participated in the auction, which began Monday morning. Nearly 100 bids were submitted, with most of them posted during the auction’s final hour when the bidding jumped by more than $5 million.

The identity of the mall’s new owner has not been disclosed. According to Ten-X, the real estate exchange company in charge of the auction, the information is confidential and won’t be public until public record documents are filed in the near future.

A spokeswoman for West Park Mall’s management company, CBL Properties in Chattanooga, Tennessee, said Wednesday there will be no immediate changes in mall operations because of the ownership change.

“It’s business as usual,” according to Stacey Keating, CBL Properties’ senior director of public relations and corporate communications, who also confirmed CBL was not among the auction bidders.

According to a posting about the mall on the online auction site, West Park Mall was just over 60% occupied as of June 1. The mall’s biggest vacancy is the 100,000-square-foot void left by the closure of the Macy’s anchor store earlier this year.

Opening in March 1981 as West Park Mall, the shopping center has changed ownership — and names — several times in the years since. Depending on the ownership, it has been known as Westfield Shoppingtown, Westfield Shopping Town West Park and Westfield West Park.

It became West Park Mall again in 2006 when it was purchased by Australia-based Centro Properties Group for a reported $64.3 million. However, it was only appraised at $16 million in 2020, according to Cape Girardeau County Assessor Bob Adams.

This week’s auction began slowly with an opening bid of $1.3 million Monday morning. Only two more bids were received Monday, raising the bid price to $2,477,222. Eleven bids were received Tuesday, with a high bid that day of $3,772,222.

Eighty bids were submitted Wednesday morning with most of those in the final minutes, often raising the bid price by several hundred thousand dollars within a matter of seconds.

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