Bidding begins in West Park Mall auction

West Park Mall is seen from above June 9 in Cape Girardeau.

Sarah Yenesel ~ Southeast Missourian

Unless more bidders come forward by Wednesday morning, it’s possible Cape Girardeau’s West Park Mall could be sold at a bigger discount than any store inside the mall ever offered.

An online auction to sell the shopping center and the 68 acres it occupies — with the exception of the mall’s separately owned J.C. Penney property — began Monday morning.

Hours into the auction process, only three bids had been submitted by undisclosed bidders. The initial bid was for $1.3 million, the auction’s minimum bid. The second was for $2,222,222. Late Monday afternoon, a third bid of $2,472,222 had been submitted. A transaction fee of $74,166.66, calculated as a percentage of the bid, would bring the sales price as of late Monday afternoon to $2,546,388.66.

But that would only be a fraction of the mall’s most recent appraisal value, which was $16 million in 2020, according to Cape Girardeau County Assessor Bob Adams.

The auction is scheduled to last about 48 hours, and is set to end Wednesday morning. Ten-X, the commercial real estate exchange company conducting the auction, says it isn’t concerned there weren’t more bidders during the auction’s initial hours.

“The first days (of an auction) are generally slow,” an unnamed representative of Ten-X told the Southeast Missourian in a text message Monday afternoon. “Pick up usually happens the last day of the auction.”

Bids are to be increased in minimum increments of $250,000, according to the Ten-X website.

The 40-year-old mall, which is managed by CBL Properties in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has a current occupancy of just over 60%, according to Ten-X.

The mall’s largest vacancy is the anchor store space formerly occupied by Macy’s, which closed earlier this year. The Ten-X webpage about the mall auction states West Park Mall “has the opportunity to introduce a national sporting goods operator, who has expressed interest in joining the mall, through an anchor backfill scenario.”

The Missourian will follow the mall auction and will report on its outcome later this week.