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With Vallco Fashion Park sold to a local investment group on June 12, plans to transform the 27-year-old shopping center into an international center of culture are one step closer to becoming a reality.
The group of investors, led by Alan Wong, a Cupertino business developer, purchased the 1.1 millionsquare-foot mall from New Yorkbased Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association for about $67 million, which is significantly lower than the $80 million originally listed by the seller.
The sale put an end to about seven months of negotiations.
The group plans to revive the shopping center by putting new tenants in the lower level of Vallco. According to a prepared statement, some of the investors' rejuvenation plans include adding new restaurants and creating a food court.
"We are going to revive Vallco Fashion Park and make it a destination spot that will serve our wonderfully diverse communities. Our plans include bringing to Cupertino an international center of culture that we believe will be unprecedented in the valley," Wong said.
Wong is already an established merchant and property owner in the Bay Area. Wong owns Grand Century Shopping Center, a Vietnamese-themed indoor mall, as well as Jade Galore Jewelry & Watch Co., a chain of stores in Milpitas, San Francisco and Cupertino.
Other principals in Wong's investment group include Emily Chen and John Nguyen.
Cupertino city officials welcomed Vallco's sale.
"We're delighted," said Steve Piasecki, the city's director of community development. "We finally have local owners to work with. Teachers [Vallco's previous owner] was difficult to get ahold of."
Piasecki said the city is excited about the new owners' plans to
revive Vallco.
"There's quite a bit of flexibility on the city's side. We're excited about the re-tenanting. And we're confident
this group can make it work," Piacecki said.
In recent years, Vallco, unable to compete with neighboring Valley Fair Mall and Stanford Shopping Center, continuously struggled with high vacancy rate and low sales.
In less than a decade, the shopping center had seen three different owners but no success.
In the most recent case, Teachers began foreclosure proceedings against the Richard E. Jacobs Group Inc. in August 2002. Jacobs Group owed Teachers more than $60 million. Teachers finally took over Vallco on Feb. 13, 2003 after no one topped the opening bid of $55 million during a public auction.
During a study session on April 15, Piasecki calculated that Vallco's underperformance costs the city about $1 million a year in sales tax revenues.
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