Grocery war heats up in west Greeley

GREELEY — Greeley’s rapidly growing west side continues to be magnet for new retail projects.

A Denver-based developer wants to build a new grocery-anchored shopping center the southwest corner of 10th Street and 59th Avenue.

Goldberg Property Associates has placed land under contract at the corner, with plans for a 16-acre project covering about 150,000 square feet of floor space.

Called Centennial Village Shopping Center, the project in the early stages of review by Greeley planning officials. Developer Mark Goldberg, who developed Greeley’s first Wal-Mart Supercenter in 1995, said he hopes to complete the new project sometime in 2005.

Goldberg said he’s close to finalizing a deal with a grocery store to anchor Centennial Village. As planned, the grocer would take about 65,000 square feet out of 99,000 planned at the core of the shopping center.

Designs call for five retail pads, which would accommodate about 50,000 total square feet of additional space. In most shopping centers, pads are taken by banks, fast-food restaurants and office buildings.

Goldberg did not disclose the would-be anchor, but real estate watchers in Greeley expect King Soopers to take the anchor position.

Safeway was scheduled to open a new Greeley store– its third in the city — on Aug. 20 at the CenterPlace shopping center, located at 47th Avenue and U.S. 34 Bypass. Albertson’s officials have acknowledged they are negotiating to build at the new Fox Run shopping center, 20th Street and 59th Avenue.

King Soopers is the only other supermarket chain actively growing in Northern Colorado.

Centennial Village sits on a potentially lively retail corner. The latest average traffic count at the intersection totals 37,500 cars per 24-hour period.

Projections call for 75,000 cars per day in the near future, said Blaine Herdman, a commercial real estate broker with Vintage Corporation, which represents one of the landowners at the corner.

Following the recent widening of 59th Avenue, “they expect it to be a main thoroughfare for Greeley before too long,” Herdman said.

Interestingly, the Centennial Village site is just one mile north of Fox Run and two miles west of the new Wal-Mart Supercenter, 10th Street and 47th Avenue — both of which will feature grocery stores.

King Soopers, which has a store at the Westlake shopping center, 20th Street and 35th Avenue, is apparently positioning itself to cater to future residential development.

The chain could be “trying to take the next leapfrog west and be able to capture new market while preserving the existing customer base at Westlake,´ said Mark Bradley, a broker for Realtec Commercial Real Estate in Greeley.

Grocery chains typically consider the population counts within a three-mile radius of the store to determine if a store is viable.

“Certainly the growth potential ?is what we’re primarily looking at,´ said Goldberg. “Not to mention, both streets are extremely good cross streets. It’s a logical node for a grocery store.”

I think you need 7,000 to 10,000 (households) within about three miles,” to support a successful store, he said. “(Then Centennial Village area) doesn’t have it yet, but does have the potential for it.

King Soopers has recently been very aggressive in the Fort Collins market, with plans under way for up to three new stores there. It’s also building a new store in Windsor, expected to open this fall.

Retail analysts believe the chain grocers are hurriedly putting up stores as a countermeasure to Wal-Mart’s advance in the food business. Based largely on the success of its Supercenters, Wal-Mart has been the nation’s No. 1 grocery chain since 2001, eclipsing Kroger, the parent company of King Soopers.

“Generally there’s a concern for how much market share Wal-Mart’s going to take with its SuperCenters,” Jonathan Ziegler, a food and retail analyst for Deutsche Bank in San Francisco, said when asked last year about King Soopers’ expansion plans in Fort Collins. “I guess what these guys are saying is, to win share back, they’ve got to provide more convenience — more stores.”

If Goldberg is successful, the net effect will be a surge of supermarket choices for the west side of Greeley.

Including the new Wal-Mart Supercenter, the Safeway at CenterPlace, the proposed Fox Run project and Centennial Village, Greeley could have four new grocery stores built west of 35th Avenue by 2005 that weren’t open in 2001.

on Facebook on LinkedIn