A Stein Mart store in Sandy Springs’ Perimeter Pointe shopping center is closing after more than 20 years, and its parent company says the landlord sought to end the lease early in advance of a long-discussed redevelopment. The landlord, DDR Corp., said that redevelopment is on the table but has not been “formalized.”
A mixed-use type of redevelopment at Perimeter Pointe has been discussed by DDR and others since at least 2005.
Perimeter Pointe is a roughly 30.5-acre shopping center at Mount Vernon Highway and Perimeter Center West on the Sandy Springs/Dunwoody border. It currently has more than 20 commercial tenants, including a Regal movie theater, and several large vacant spaces. It recently lost a location of the shuttered Babies R Us chain, though last year also added Dick’s Sporting Goods, which took over a location of the bankrupt Sports Authority chain.
Linda L. Tasseff, the director of investor relations at Florida-based Stein Mart, Inc., said the discount department store’s 35,000-square-foot Perimeter Pointe location will close in early September. Stein Mart has been at the shopping center since October 1995, Tasseff said.
“Our landlord, DDR, asked us to terminate [the lease] early,” said Tasseff. “It is our understanding that DDR has plans to redevelop the center… It is our understanding that we were asked to terminate the lease due to the pending redevelopment.”
An executive in DDR’s Atlanta office, who declined to identify himself, said that Perimeter Pointe redevelopment is on the table.
“We certainly have plans to do something there, but nothing’s been formalized,” he said when asked about redevelopment, noting it’s a “great market” and a center with “a lot of area.”
Asked about the status of other leases, he referred questions to Ohio-based DDR’s marketing department, which did not return a phone call.
A manager at another Perimeter Pointe tenant, the coworking space Roam, said he had not heard of any lease or redevelopment changes. Some other tenants’ owners and managers could not immediately be reached for comment.
Perimeter Pointe’s biggest immediate neighbor is MARTA’s Sandy Springs Station. MARTA’s transit-oriented development officials “have not had any recent discussions with [DDR] about their planned redevelopment,” according to spokesperson Stephany Fisher.
Built in 1995, according to Fulton County property records, Perimeter Pointe was recommended for mixed-use redevelopment in the 2005 Perimeter Livable Centers Initiative study. A similar plan was suggested in a 2010 master’s student project displayed at the Museum of Design Atlanta.
At a 2016 meeting about another redevelopment proposal nearby, a DDR official said the company had a “very conceptual” idea of turning Perimeter Pointe into a mixed retail and housing project as an “intensification” of its uses.
As for Stein Mart, Tasseff that several other metro Atlanta locations will remain open, including one in Brookhaven.