Montgomery Mall Facing Uncertain Future Under New Ownership

Tony Di Domizio | North Penn Now•

A drone view of the 1.1-million-square-foot Montgomery Mall in Montgomery Township, taken at the early stages of the coronavirus shutdown.

With a New York firm that has a history of mall mismanagement now holding ownership of Montgomery Mall, the once-popular shopping mecca’s economic and commercial fate is a spiral ramp of uncertainty.

According to the Bucks County Courier Times, retail renters at the mall have neither been updated on the status of the $55 million sale of the mall to Kohan Retail Investment Group of Great Neck, NY nor on the plans to attract holiday shoppers to the mall.

A current look at the Montgomery Mall reveals a dilapidated shell of its former glory: Almost the entire Food Court has vacant spaces, offering very limited eating options, and vacant storefront windows on both levels of the mall have been reduced to nothing more than a space to hang “For Rent” ads and promotions for local charities and nonprofits, like North Wales Library or the local Rotary Club, per the article. Even the escalators have been inoperable for months.

In recent years, there have been exoduses from the mall, including LensCrafters, which moved to English Village, and other major stores and restaurants shuttered, like Sears and Grub Burger Bar.

Around November 2021, after three months on the market, and two rounds of bidding, a Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas judge approved the foreclosure sale of Montgomery Mall for $55 million to Kohan, using the alias Montgomery Mall Realty Holdings, according to Natalie Kostelni of the Philadelphia Business Journal.

Kohan’s portfolio includes about 50 malls across the United States, such as Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Washington Crown Center in Washington, PA, Clearview Mall in Butler, PA, Colonial Park Mall in Harrisburg, PA, and Lycoming Mall in Pennsdale, PA, as well as two hotels in New York City: The Gallivant Times Square and Shoreham Hotel, according to the report.

The 1.1-million-square-foot Montgomery Township property, which sits on 105 acres, was appraised at $57.6 million. It was previously appraised at $195 million in 2014, according to the article.

The sale price was less than half of the $118.78 million judgement rendered against Mall at Montgomery, L.P. at the time of foreclosure in June 2021.

According to the article, under its former owner Simon Properties, the mall boasted 73 percent of space under lease, but Kohan does not need to file any annual investor reports since it is not a publicly traded company.

According to the report, Kohan has a history of reinvigorating malls, but it also has a track record of poor management.

Retailers at Midland Mall in Michigan, owned by Kohan, were told two months ago that they can be removed from the property due to malfunctioning fire alarms, and reportedly Kohan owes millions in taxes related to malls it owns in Ohio, New York and Massachusetts. In the report, Rotterdam Mall in New York had its power shut off due to past due utility bills.

(Editor's note: a prior version of this article included Smokey Bones as one of the closed businesses inside of the Montgomery Mall. It has been updated to reflect that Grub Burger Bar was closed and Smokey Bones remains open. We apologize for this error.)

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