Deal closes on $64.3 million purchase of Cape mall

~ Customers may notice that the interior color scheme is changing from red to blue.

The mall's name change is official: West Park Mall is back.

The new owner of the former Westfield West Park on Monday officially completed its acquisition of six shopping centers, including the one in Cape Girardeau.

Centro Watt, the firm that announced its intentions to buy the malls last month, said the joint-venture company's first order of business was to change the name of the malls back to what they had been called prior to Westfield buying them.

"It's really changed officially already. It's operating as West Park Mall now," said Mitchell Brown, spokesman for the joint venture between Centro Properties Group of Melbourne, Australia, and Watt Commercial Property, a privately held real estate company in Los Angeles.

Temporary banner-like signs are going up any day now, Brown said from his office in Philadelphia, adding that permanent "West Park Mall" signs should be up in six to eight weeks.

Centro Watt, which manages Centro's 107 American properties, also bought malls in Los Angeles; Enfield, Conn.; Elyria and Mansfield, Ohio; and Lakewood, Colo. The deal for all of the malls was valued at $524 million, with a price tag of the local 502,350-square foot shopping center set at $64.3 million.

West Park Mall is the name the mall had from the time it opened in March 1981 until Westfield -- also based in Australia -- bought it in 1993. Since then, it's been Westfield Shoppingtown West Park and Westfield West Park.

But Centro wants to keep the malls' identities local, Mitchell said.

"Our philosophy is a more localized approach," he said. "We don't have a corporate branding philosophy like the previous owner does. For their way to work, you have to have a cluster of properties in an area for that to get legs under it."

The name isn't likely to be the only change though. Mitchell said Centro executives are in the process of visiting all of the malls to meet with individual mall managers to "get a feel" of how the properties are doing and ways improvements can be made. Improvements could involve leasing options or other development. A detailed business plan will be formulated, he said.

Mall manager Paul Dobbins said many of the changes right now involve the logistics of the name change. He said that customers may also notice that the interior color scheme is changing from Westfield's trademark red to blue.

As to the rest, Dobbins encouraged customers to stay tuned.

"There will be good things ahead as we make changes to the West Park Mall," Dobbins said.

Then, after a pause, Dobbins laughed and added: "It's nice to be able to call it that."

smoyers@semissourian.com

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